A Study On The Effect Of Direct Feedback And Metalinguistic Feedback On Senior High School Students' English Writing Self-efficacy

Second language learner's writing ability,one of the criteria to assess student's language competence,is influenced not only by external factors such as writing material and writing contexts,but also by students' psychological factors,e.g.,self-efficacy.Self-efficacy refers to the individual's judgments on whether the individual himself is competent enough to complete certain tasks.Teacher feedback on students' academic performance affects their self-efficacy.How English teachers utilize effective feedback to enhance students' writing self-efficacy and promote their writing performance has become one of the research focuses in second language acquisition field.Among the six categories of feedback put forward by Ellis(2009),direct feedback has more popularity with English teachers,while metalinguistic feedback perfectly meets the requirements of developing students' learning strategies and maintaining their positive attitudes to learn in the National English Curriculum Standard for High Schools(2017).Verbal persuasion,one of the four influence factors of self-efficacy(Bandura,1977),has been widely adopted to improve individual's self-efficacy for it's great availability and effectiveness,thus teacher feedback,as a form of it,is often employed to help improve students' self-efficacy.Considering that,the author conducted an empirical study to explore the effects of English teachers' direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback on senior high school students' English writing self-efficacy.This study aims to answer three questions:(1)What effect does direct feedback have on high school students with different levels of writing self-efficacy?(2)What effect does metalinguistic feedback have on high school students with different levels of writing self-efficacy?(3)What are the preferences of students with different levels of writing self-efficacy for two types of feedback?Eighty research participants were randomly chosen from two classes of Senior Two in Shandong Experimental High School.In the pre-test,all the students were asked to complete a writing task and fill out a writing self-efficacy questionnaire.The data analysis showed that there existed no significant differences between the two classes.On the basis of questionnaire,the students of each class were divided into three groups: high-level group,intermediate-level group,and low-level group,respectively,with groups in Class A named A1,A2,and A3,and those in Class B are named B1,B2,and B3.Then students in Class A received metalinguistic feedback in their writing class,and those in Class B received direct feedback.After finishing the six writing tasks in 13 weeks of experiment,the students completed the questionnaire again.To make the results more reliable,the author randomly chose one student from each group for an interview.By means of SPSS 20.0,a quantitative analysis of the two questionnaires was conducted by the descriptive statistical analysis,the paired sample t-test,and the independent sample t-test.Finally,combined with the qualitative analysis of the interview's recordings,the conclusions are as follows:(1)Direct feedback strongly affects students with low-level English writing self-efficacy,while slightly affects the other two groups.(2)Metalinguistic feedback strongly influences students with high-level English writing self-efficacy,and produces a minor effect on those from the other two groups.(3)Students with high-level English writing self-efficacy can benefit from metalinguistic feedback;students with low-level writing self-efficacy get promotion from direct feedback;those with intermediate-level English writing self-efficiency could not benefit from feedback.Based on these,the study proposes pedagogical implications.English teachers provide different types of feedback for students,guide students to make reasonable attributions,and view students with a developmental sight.Students should make reasonable attribution and make use of teacher feedback.The study has some deficiencies,such as uncontrollable variables and short experiment period.Moreover,suggestions for further study are also put forward including enlarging the sample size and extending the experiment time.