An ApplIcaTion Of INdirecT Feedback In EnglisH Writing Teaching In Senior High SchOol

It is considered that English writing is such a difficult task for Chinese students to grasp.With the development of process writing,feedback has become an indispensable part of writing.It has been a hot topic about how to improve students' writing with the guidance of feedback and which kind of feedback is more effective.Kendon Kurzer's error distribution is adopted,which is divided into three parts: global errors,local errors and mechanical errors.And in the present research,marking the error types and underlining the errors will be employed,which are in line with senior high school students' cognitive level.52 students from Linfen No.12 Senior High School are involved into the study,and they are divided into two groups randomly: experiment group 1 and experiment group 2.After students in EG1 handed in their passage,they will receive this kind of feedback,which is marking the error types.Then they will correct their errors under the guidance of teacher's feedback.If there are still errors left in their corrected draft,they are supposed to ask their teacher for help.In order to make a better distinguish among what are corrected by themselves and teacher,they should be marked by different colored pens.However,underlining errors will be received by students' in experiment group 2 and they need to recognize the errors first and then correct them.If there are still errors left in their corrected draft,they can ask their peers for help.Just like students in EG1,colored pens are also used.Then corrected draft will be handed in to the author to analyze.Experiment and questionnaire are used to study the application of indirect feedback in senior high school.The study aims to explore the following research questions:(1)What is the distribution of error types in the compositions between the two groups?(2)What is the effect of these two indirect feedbacks(marking the error types and underling the errors)on students' writing accuracy and complexity?(3)What are senior high school students' and teachers' attitudes toward indirect feedback?The experiment is composed of a pretest and a posttest.All of them have written 7 writings in the 16-week experiment,one essay every two weeks on average.Students will correct their essays under the direction of teacher's feedback,and teacher collects the data that she needs,analyzing the distribution of errors and the effect of different kinds of indirect feedback on writing accuracy and complexity.And all the data will be analyzed by SPSS 21.0 with independence sample t-test and paired sample t-test.At the end of the experiment,a questionnaire will be distributed to investigate students' attitudes towards indirect feedback.At the same time,teachers will be interviewed to know more about their attitudes to indirect feedback,and whether there are some suggestions that they can propose for indirect feedback.The thesis has following findings:Experiment group 1:(1)most of errors focus on global errors,such as verb tenses,verb form and sentence structure;(2)as for accuracy,the improvement is focused on global errors,such as tense and sentence structure;as for complexity,students in EG1 can use more complicated words and sentence structures with their teacher's help,such as subjective mood;Experiment group 2:(1)most of errors focus on local errors and mechanical errors,such as prepositions and determiners,spelling,punctuation and capital letter;(2)as for accuracy,the improvement is focused on local errors and mechanical errors,such as prepositions,determiner,spelling,punctuation and so on;as for complexity,owning to their limit of knowledge,students in EG2 made less progress in complexity;(3)as for teachers' and students' attitudes,most of students hold positive attitudes towards teacher's feedback,and they are desired to receive the feedback from their teacher.Most importantly,they want to receive feedback,which is not only marking error types or underlining the errors,but also combining with other corrective feedback,such as teacher feedback and peer feedback.And all of these are accordance with their cognitive level.