Effects Of Teacher Feedback On The Writing Ability Of The Junior English Majors

Writing is one of the basic skills that second language learners should have.Therefore,how to improve the effectiveness of writing teaching has always been the research focus among domestic and foreign scholars.Writing feedback plays an important role in improving students’ writing ability.However,based on literature review,it is found that most studies have focused on the effects of different types of feedback on students’ writing,or the effects of different forms of teacher feedback on students ’ writing ability in recent years.Few studies have focused on the different emphasis of teacher’s feedback,which brings different writing effects to students and the extent to which students absorb teacher ’ s feedback.Although scholars at home and abroad have studied the effectiveness of teacher feedback from different perspectives and ways,their conclusions are different.Therefore,how teacher feedback with different emphasis affects the development of Chinese learners’ writing ability needs further verification,which is the purpose and significance of this study.In view of this,this study explores two different types of teacher feedback,the focus on form and the focus on both form and content,on the writing ability of the junior English majors.And it aims to answer the following questions: Which feedback method is more effective on the improvement of students’ English writing performance? What are the differences between the two kinds of feedback in view of learners’ self-revision? What are students’ attitudes and expectations towards teacher feedback?Quantitative and qualitative methods were used in the study.The subjects were 52first-year English majors of Grade 2017 in Northeast Petroleum University,who were from four parallel classes,and randomly divided into two groups,27 in the experimental group and25 in the control group.They were trained in writing for 16 weeks.Eight propositional compositions were completed.The experimental group received form feedback and the control group received form and content feedback.Each composition would receive feedback from the teacher and be rewritten by the students based on the feedback.Scores at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester(essays on different topics)would be recorded and discussed as data,and language form scores and text content scores would be obtained,and processed and compared by SPSS statistical software.At the end of the study,52 subjects were given questionnaires and some of them were interviewed.The results of quantitative and qualitative analysis show that: firstly,the students in the form feedback group and the students in the form and content combined feedback group haveimproved their performance after the experiment,but there is no significant difference between the two groups.Secondly,in terms of revision effect,the experimental group receiving formal feedback improved its grammar and paragraph organization,while the control group receiving the form and content combined feedback improved its grammar,vocabulary,overall organization,paragraph organization and content.But the difference between the students in the control group was slightly greater than that in the experimental group.Thirdly,it is generally believed that teacher feedback is beneficial to the improvement of English writing.Among different types of teacher feedback,students tend to receive the form and content combined feedback.This study provides a reference on how to use teacher’s writing feedback effectively for English teachers to improve students’ English writing level.