The Effects Of Teacher Written Corrective Feedback On English Writing Accuracy Of Senior High School Students

Writing,as a part of four language skills,plays more and more important role in foreign language learning.However,writing is also considered the most difficult skill especially for senior high school students whose writing accuracy is generally low.Thus,how to improve students' writing ability has aroused more and more teachers and scholars' attention.During the past decades of exploration,written corrective feedback(WCF)has been introduced in English writing teaching and there aroused a heated debate on the effectiveness of WCF.However,no conclusive agreement is achieved.Also,the debate concerning which type of WCF is more effective is still unsolved.In recent years,researchers abroad have done a lot of studies on the effectiveness of WCF.In China,there also emerged more and more empirical studies conducted among college students or English-major students.but there is still a lack of studies on lower educational level students in China.Besides,few studies take students' different English levels into consideration.By reviewing theoretical framework of WCF,this study is conducted among senior high school students,which aims to explore the following questions: 1)What effects will direct and indirect written corrective feedback have on the writing accuracy of students? 2)Which kind of written corrective feedback is more beneficial to the improvement of writing accuracy for the higher-level and lower-level students respectively? 3)What are the students' attitudes and preference towards direct WCF and indirect WCF?Several research methods are adopted in the present study,including literature analysis,qualitative and quantitative study.The author explores the relevant important theories and key concepts,and summarizes the related researches at home and abroad by means of literature analysis.Experimental method is employed at the main stage of this study.The participants are students from one of senior high schools in Hangzhou,Zhejiang Province and they are randomly divided into direct group(receiving direct feedback)and indirect group(receiving indirect feedback).All students were required to finish 8 writing tasks and during the experiment,students in different groups receive different types of feedback,which serves as a main intervention during the experiment.The data is collected from writing tasks and analyzed by SPSS.Descriptive statistics,Independent-Samples T Test and Paired-Samples T Test are mainly used to analyze the data.Based on the research procedure above,major findings of present study are as follows.(1)Both direct and indirect corrective feedback can significantly improve writing accuracy and on the whole,direct feedback is slightly more effective than indirect feedback in improving writing accuracy.(2)For students at higher level,the effectiveness of direct feedback and indirect feedback is almost same.While for students at lower level,direct corrective feedback is more effective in enhancing writing accuracy.(3)Most students expect to receive corrective feedback from teachers and they confirm that WCF can help them improve writing accuracy.Relatively,they prefer direct feedback.Based on the findings above,some implications are put forward in the following: 1)Teachers should employ WCF in the process of writing teaching.2)Teachers can try to combine direct and indirect feedback when giving feedback.3)Self-correct and peer correction are encouraged in writing practice.