The Study Of Effects Of Teachers' Written Corrective Feedback On English Writing Of High School Students

This study aims to investigate the effects of teachers' written corrective feedback on Chinese high school students' writing accuracy and complexity,which is also two branches of writing quality.Whether the teachers' written corrective feedback can effectively improve students'writing accuracy and which kind of feedback is more effective without doing harm to the writing complexity have been debated in the past years.Lots of research has been made on this subject both at home and abroad.However,the study on high school students in China is still relatively limited,at the same time,the research both on the accuracy and complexity of writing is relatively limited.Therefore,this study will investigate whether the direct feedback(being provided with the correct form directly)and the indirect feedback(only scribing the errors)can effectively improve students'writing accuracy and complexity.Two questions are raised in this present study:(1)what are the effects of the direct and indirect written corrective feedback on high school students' writing accuracy?(2)what are the effects of the direct and indirect written corrective feedback on high school students' writing syntactic complexity?A total of 90 high school students from a high school in Changsha,Hunan Province were selected.The 90 students were divided into three groups randomly:direct group,indirect group and control group,each one was required to write six English essays.The experiment consists of pre-test,immediate pre-test and delayed post-test,which has lasted 13 weeks.The accuracy was measured by the error rate,and the complexity was reflected by the syntactic complexity with the formula of "clause/T unit".Finally the SPSS 21.0 was used in the statistical analysis of the data.The results of the study are as follows:With regard to the first question,the results show that the writing accuracy of both direct and indirect group has significantly improved.That is to say,the written corrective feedback can have the positive effect on high school students' writing accuracy.But the direct corrective feedback presents better results in the short term and the indirect feedback may be more effective in improving high school students writing accuracy in the long term.In terms of the second question,the study shows that the writing syntactic complexity of high school students has neither increased nor decreased among all the three groups,which means that the written corrective feedback doesn't cause the negative effect on high school students' writing complexity.There are also some limitations when the time and other objective factors are taken into consideration.(1)Considering the sample size and experimental period,the universality needs to be verified.(2)The fluency,which is the third dimension of the English writing,is not covered.(3)Students' second language levels have not been studied.(4)The errors in students' writings have not been classified for the special research.Based on those two findings,some implications can be provided by the author for the teaching of English writing in Chinese high schools.