A Study Of Indirect Feedback And Direct Feedback In English Writing Instruction In Senior High School

Currently,English writing instruction is in a severe situation.For most middle school students,writing is a burdensome task,students' interest in writing is not high.Correspondingly,teachers do not know what effective feedback methods should be used to stimulate students' writing motivation and improve their writing performance.As process writing teaching methods are more and more accepted by people,teachers' corrective feedback plays an increasingly important and indispensable role in writing instruction,and how should teachers apply corrective feedback to improve students' writing skills has become a significant topic in foreign language teaching research.These studies are more concerned with these two important corrective feedback methods: direct feedback and indirect feedback.However,despite all the research,there have been no consistent results in terms of the effects of corrective feedback so far.In the framework of process teaching,output hypothesis and attention hypothesis,and based on previous studies,this study compares the effects of two different approaches in corrective feedback through teaching experiments,aiming to explore the effects of these two feedback methods in high school English writing instruction.This study used both qualitative and quantitative methods in a one-semester teaching experiment conducted on a total of 84 students in two classes in a senior high school in Shandong Province.The study recruited students with similar background from two classes of grade 1.For the experimental class,indirect feedback was applied in English writing instruction,and for the control class,direct feedback was applied.This study aims to address four research questions: 1)For high school students,indirect feedback and direct feedback,which can reduce the number of errors in student composition;2)What is the difference between the two feedback methods for different types of errors;3)What are the effects of direct feedback and indirect feedback on learners of different levels;4)What are the attitudes of learners to the two feedback methods.After the experiment,4 students were randomly selected from each of the two classes for interviews,each class including 2 high-level students and 2-low students to confirm the numerical data of the study.The research results showed that: 1)In the post-experimental test,there are significant differences in error rates between the two classes.The class that adopts indirect feedback in writing have a lower number of errors than the class that adopts direct feedback method.2)Among the five types of errors: verb-type errors,noun-type errors,article errors,sentence-structure errors,and vocabulary choices or formal errors,indirect feedback is better than direct feedback in the three types of errors: verb-type errors,noun-suffix errors,and sentence structure errors.Direct feedback is more effective than indirect feedback in correcting the article type of errors.There is no particularly significant improvement in vocabulary choices or formal error types under these two feedback methods.3)For high-level students,the effect of indirect feedback seems to be more significant;for low-level students,the effect of direct feedback seems to be more effective,but not significantly.4)Through interviews,students in the experimental class expressed their preference for indirect feedback from teachers,which they think can help them to pay attention to the mistakes,guide them to actively think about the mistakes and correct them by themselves.However,some low-level students indicated that this method is difficult for them,and they hope that teachers can give more revision tips.The students in control group expressed their preferences for direct feedback from teachers.They think that this way can increase their interest in writing and they are not afraid of writing any more.However,some high-level students argue that direct feedback is too simple for them to improve their self-modification ability.Finally,based on the experimental research results and the problems encountered,the author puts forward corresponding suggestions for the feedback procedure in English writing instruction in high school,and improve the students' English writing ability.