A Case Study On Teachers' Written Corrective Feedback In High School English Writing Instruction

In the past two decades,written corrective feedback(WCF)has been a heated area of research in both field of second language acquisition(SLA)and second language writing(SLW).And there has been a long dispute over the effectiveness of WCF.Not until recently,a good number of studies have presented convincing evidence on the effectiveness of WCF.Scholars and educators now gradually have become interested in facilitating the practice of WCF.Ferris(2014)intended to fathom out the mechanism behind teachers' WCF practices as well as the philosophy of their pedagogical choice.Likewise,this study attempts to investigate the relation between students' preferences and teachers' actual practices of WCF;teachers' beliefs and actual practices of WCF.This study is conducted in Nanning No.X High School during the author's internship.120 Senior One students in two parallel classes and their respective teachers(Teacher A and Teacher B)are the main subjects recruited in this study.During the study,a questionnaire is dispatched to all the students,followed by two interviews and the analysis of 360 writing drafts with teachers' WCF.The results reveal that students,in general,appreciate the WCF from their teachers.They take it serious after getting back their handed-in compositions from their teachers.Moreover,there are discrepancies between students' preferences and teachers' actual practices of WCF.For instance,students tend to have all their errors identified by their teachers but correct them by themselves.While Teacher A just focused on several students' errors,Teacher B corrected most errors for her students.In addition,teachers' actual practices of WCF generally accord with the beliefs in their minds.The minor discrepancy exists in the amount and explicitness of the WCF provided by teachers.Teacher A adjusts her WCF strategies according to her students' situations,thus the WCF she provided varies from draft to draft.As a matter of fact,she provided more WCF on students' errors than she had self-depicted.Teacher B,on the contrary,adopted a unified mode of WCF.She provided WCF on all student errors as she had reported,due to the limited time and energy.In conjunction with the previous studies,the author suggests that teachers should focus on students' follow-up responses;they may reconsider the viability of self-editing and peer-editing,and give students training on self-editing strategies.In addition,teachers should reflect on their WCF practices.