A Study Of Status Of Teachers' Written Corrective Feedback To Senior High School Students' English Writing

Writing,as a language output skill,needs corrective feedback from teachers to help learners correct their target language errors and improve their writing level.Effective teachers' corrective feedback plays an important role in the improvement of students' writing ability.It can not only improve their language use,but also stimulate students' initiative in English writing.Written corrective feedback in this study refers to teachers' providing of the written information to students in some aspects of their composition so as to attract students' attention to their errors and revise their writing to improve their English writing level.In the field of foreign language writing teaching,researches on teachers' written corrective feedback has been valued all the time.Compared with foreign countries,the feedback research in foreign language writing started late in our country.Since 1990 s,more and more domestic researchers have paid attention to teachers' written corrective feedback.Most of the studies are concerned about the comparison of teachers and students' attitudes towards oral corrective feedback or classroom error correction,and most of them focus on college students.Moreover,the studies on the attitude and opinions of teachers and students to teachers' written corrective feedback in high school English writing are few.Therefore,based on the previous findings,this study is to make an investigation with an in-depth analysis of teachers' written corrective feedback in senior high English writing and find out the existing problems.Finally,some suggestions are put forward to guide the teachers' written corrective feedback behavior and raise its effectiveness.Based on Swain's Output Hypothesis and Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis,this study chooses 30 English teachers and 203 senior high students from Hequ Middle School in Shanxi Province as subjects.Through questionnaires,interview and the sample analysis of the students' compositions to investigate and analyze the present situation of written corrective feedback of senior high school English teachers,this study mainly answers the three questions as follows:1.What is the senior high school English teachers' attitude to providing written corrective feedback in students' English writing?2.What are the types and content of written corrective feedback used by teachers in senior high school students' English writing?3.What is the students' perception of teachers' written corrective feedback in senior high students' English writing?Through the analysis and discussion of the data collected,this study made the following findings:(1)Most senior high school English teachershave a positive attitude towards teachers' written corrective feedback and believe that teachers' written corrective feedback is helpful to the improvement of students' English writing level.Furthermore,more than half of English teachers assert that providing written corrective feedback is the teachers' responsibility,but they don't like to provide comprehensive corrective feedback to students' English compositions.(2)In terms of the types and content of written corrective feedback commonly used by teachers,most teachers prefer to use direct corrective feedback.Besides,teachers mainly give corrective feedback on grammar and vocabulary,and providing corrective feedback on content and structure is relatively less.(3)In terms of students' perception of teachers' written corrective feedback,most students have a positive attitude to teachers' written corrective feedback,and they think teachers' written corrective feedback is helpful to the improvement of their English writing level.Many students wish teachers to provide a comprehensive form of written corrective feedback,that is,score plus corrective feedback plus comments.Therefore,this study suggests that firstly,English teachers should improve their ability of providing effective corrective feedback.Secondly,according to the types of errors in the students' compositions,the appropriate corrective feedback method is selected.Finally,taking into account the differences in students' writing level,motivation and interestand other factors and adopt personalized corrective feedback.