The Effect Of Teacher Feedback On The Simple Past Tense Acquisition In Senior High School Students' English Writing

Teacher feedback is an essential part which can not be overlooked in English writing teaching.Whether teacher feedback is effective and which type of feedback is more effective in improving learners' writing proficiency has attracted more and more researchers' attention.The previous empirical studies mainly focused on the effectiveness of various teacher feedback and the comparison between different types of feedback on accuracy,fluency,or complexity of students' writing.This paper turns to teacher feedback's implementation of the use of simple past tense in English writing,which explores the effects of two different kinds of feedback(direct feedback and indirect feedback)on the acquisition of English simple past tense in high school students' writing.It attempts to answer the following three questions.(1)Do teachers' direct and indirect feedback in English writing influence senior high school students' acquisition of simple past tense?(2)If so,which kind of feedback(direct or indirect feedback)has the greater influence on improving students' acquisition of simple past tense in English writing?(3)What perceptions do students have towards teachers' direct and indirect feedback in English writing?The experimental study on the above questions lasted for 8 weeks.Two parallel classes of 63 students in total from a common high school in Nanchang City Senior Grade 1 participated in the study.The two classes were randomly divided into two groups: direct feedback class and indirect feedback class.In the direct feedback class,students received the feedback on both the target structure and the content of the writing and teachers not only marked out their errors but also corrected directly.The students in indirect feedback class received the feedback that teachers just marked out and underlined the errors but not corrected them.The English teacher who has taught more than 5 years with the author rated the compositions.In the last week of the experiment,a questionnaire which included current condition about English writing in senior high school and the content and way of teachers' feedback and students' attitudes and preferences to teacher feedback in English writing was given to students.SPSS 17.0 was adopted to do quantitative analysis of all the collected data.Statistical methods include Paired T-tests and Independent Sample Test.Theresults revealed that:(1)The accuracy of target structure of students of both groups improved greatly in the posttest,which approves that the two kinds of feedback have an influence on the acquisition of the target structure.(2)In the Independent Sample Test,there is no significant difference between direct and indirect feedback class.This states that indirect feedback class was not better than direct feedback class.(3)Results of the questionnaire show students prefer direct feedback,and expect that teacher feedback should contain grades,comments and practical suggestions.Also,feedback should focus on content,structure,words and grammar of writing.At last,this study offered suggestions for the positive effect of direct feedback and indirect feedback in second language writing,and pedagogical implications on how to provide effective feedback in future teaching and learning were also put forward in this thesis.