An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Teachers' Written Corrective Feedback On Middle School Students' Writing Accuracy And Error Correction Rate

Writing,one of the four basic skills in English learning,is often considered the most difficult skill to master.With the emergence of the process teaching approach in the 1970 s,teachers' written corrective feedback begins to play an increasingly important role in English writing.According to theories of Noticing Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis,teachers' written corrective feedback enables students to notice the gap between the output language they produced and the target language they are expected to produce.However,the academic community has not yet reached a consensus on which kind of feedback is more effective on writing.This paper tries to explore the effectiveness of both direct corrective feedback and indirect corrective feedback in improving English writing accuracy and error correction rate of middle school students at different language proficiency levels.And it aims to answer three questions:(1)For the different levels of students,do direct and indirect corrective feedback have different effects on their writing accuracy? If so,what are the differences?(2)For these students,what effects do direct and indirect corrective feedback have on their error correction rate?(3)What are the different students' attitudes towards teachers' written corrective feedback?A three-month experiment was carried out.A total of 66 students of Grade Nine from a middle school took part in the experiment.The students were divided into one high level group(33)and one low level group(33).During the process,each group was subdivided into two experimental groups(11 respectively)and one control group(11)respectively.The teacher provided direct or indirect written corrective feedback to the two experimental groups with high language proficiency respectively,while thecontrol group with high language proficiency did not have any form of written feedback.So do the groups with low language proficiency.A pretest was done to test students' writing accuracy before the experiment.Both the qualitative and quantitative methods of research were employed and different research instruments like pretest,writing tasks and questionnaire were used.The different effects of two kinds of feedback on writing accuracy were tested by comparing the error rate in students' writing within the two groups of different English proficiency respectively.The different effects of different kinds of feedback on error correction rate were done both in the short-term practice and long-term practice also with these two groups respectively.A questionnaire was used to investigate students' attitudes towards teachers' feedback.The data from the writing tasks and questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS 16.0.The results showed that direct and indirect corrective feedback can both improve the accuracy and error correction rate of middle school students' English writing.As far as accuracy is concerned,both feedback methods contributed to the improvement of the high-level students,while for the low-level students,direct corrective feedback was more helpful to improve their writing accuracy.As far as error correction rate is concerned,indirect corrective feedback was slightly better for high-level students in the short-term practice,while direct corrective feedback was more effective on students at low levels.In the long-term practice,direct corrective feedback had a great effect on grammar correction of high-level students,while indirect corrective feedback helped to improve their grammar and vocabulary.But for low-level students,direct corrective feedback helped their grammar and mechanics,while indirect corrective feedback only affected their mechanics.Furthermore,the questionnaires implied that students hold positive attitudes towards teachers' feedback.Thus,teachers should provide different kinds of feedback not only according to students' different English levels,but also the different kinds of errors they make.