A Study On The Effect Of Different Types Of Teachers' Written Feedback On English Writing Revision In High School

The importance of teacher feedback in English writing teaching has been recognized.With the help of teacher feedback,students can realize the merits and demerits in their own composition,find out the problems in it and revise it based on teachers' suggestions.This study aims at finding out what effect different types of teachers' written feedback exert on English writing revision in high school and what high school students think of English writing revision based on teachers' written feedback.Both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed in the research.The thirty Grade One students participating in the present study were chosen from a high school in Guangdong Province.The research questions were as follows: 1)Which type of teachers' written feedback is most likely to encourage student revision? 2)What changes occur in students' written composition after their revision in response to teachers' written feedback? Are these changes successful? 3)What are students' attitudes toward English writing revision based on different types of teachers' written feedback? In order to address the first and the second questions,two writing tasks were conducted.An interview was used to answer the third question.The research findings are: 1)Advice was most likely to encourage student revision while praise was least likely to encourage student revision;2)During the revision process,students revised their writing at word level mostly but at discourse level leastly.Although praise,advice and criticism encouraged some revisions,these revisions were rarely successful.3)The reason why the students appreciated advice was that it was very moderate and quite helpful in encouraging them to improve their compositions.Praise conveyed a message to the students that the teacher had recognized what they had written,so they didn't need to make any improvement.Therefore,in spite of their liking for praise,the students didn't tend to use it to make revision.The reason why the students were keen on revising their writing at word level was that it's common for them to make word errors and it's easy for them to correct these errors.However,due to the lack of discourse knowledge,the students rarely revised their compositions at discourse level.