| In the evaluation of students' compositions, the teachers attach importance to accuracy in both grammar and vocabulary and consider improvement in accuracy contributes to writing quality. Since the 1990s, the TWCF, namely teacher's written corrective feedback, has been widely studied to help second language or foreign language learners achieve higher accuracy and better quality in their writings. However, in the mean time, the debate on the effectiveness of the written corrective feedback is far from being settled since Truscott's (1996) review article "The Case against Grammar Correction in L2 Writing Classes" claimed that the teachers' written corrective feedback was ineffective and should be abandoned. Despite the fact that there are plenty of empirical studies abroad, there are fewer relative studies in China. In addition. the researches abroad were mainly carried out in ESL context, which is different from the EFL context in China. Meanwhile, researches in China mostly chose college students as subjects, the same case with those abroad. Therefore, there are relatively fewer studies on TWCF based on the writing teaching in the context of high school in China. So in order to help the high school English teachers obtain a better way of giving feedback to students' writings and put it into practice, this paper focuses on the application research on Baodi No. 9 Middle School to prove that the written corrective feedback method can effectively improve accuracy in students'writings and promote their writing quality as well.The purpose of this study is to apply TWCF in order to achieve the objectives in the New Curriculum Standards and explore and find a more effective and efficient way of evaluating students' writings. The study aims to explore solutions to the following research questions:1 In what way can TWCF improve accuracy in students' writing?2 Will TWCF reduce or improve the quality of students' writing? Why?3 What attitude do high school students have towards TWCF?Two parallel classes of NO. 9 Middle School in Baodi Tianjin were randomly selected as theControl Class (CC) and the Experimental Class (EC) with the number of 33 students each participating in this 12-week study. The CC and EC remained the same in writing competence,teaching materials, and English learning time. The CC received a general content feedback while the EC received TWCF. The research tools for the experiment were writing experiment, a questionnaire and a short report. Every student wrote 9 essays and revised their work based on the feedback given by the teachers. The number of errors per hundred words and the holistic scores from the first, the fifth and the last compositions of each student were stored and analyzed by SPSS 16.0. Through independent-Samples T Test and Paired-Samples T Test, this paper achieved the following results.1) The method of TWCF is effective in improving accuracy significantly in students' writing in new pieces of writing;2) TWCF helps promote students' writing quality;3) High school students have a positive attitude towards TWCF.In the present study, some suggestions on giving effective feedback are also given to assist teachers to provide more suitable feedback in EFL writing classrooms to improve students'writing ability. The teachers' feedback can help the learners to notice their gap between IL and TL. And besides, most learners expect the teachers' feedback. Therefore, teachers should provide systematic corrective feedback for the students. When giving feedback, teachers should also take various factors into account and explore feedback that is appropriate to the learners'language level. Meanwhile, apart from the problems in language form, problems concerning language content should also be considered, thus improving learners' language proficiency from all aspects. In addition, teachers should also offer students adequate chances to revise their writings, through which learners can notice their errors and help them internalize and consolidate their knowledge in foreign language. |
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