Effects Of Teacher Corrective Feedback On Chinese Senior High School Students' Accuracy Of Prepositions In English Writing

English writing,one of the five basic skills of English,is an indication of learners'integrative language proficiency,but it has always been the weakness for English learners in the language learning process.Since "feedback" was introduced into writing teaching in the 1970s,it has attracted widespread attention from classroom practitioners and researchers.Many researchers have focused on teacher written corrective feedback(WCF)and a large quantity of empirical studies have been devoted to exploring the impact of teacher WCF on learners' writing.However,the effectiveness of teacher WCF on improving students' writing accuracy and overall writing quality has so far been quite controversial.Compared with a large number of empirical studies on teacher WCF done abroad,there are relatively few empirical studies on teacher WCF conducted in China.The existing empirical studies mainly focus on the writing accuracy of students,with different language points put together,but few studies focus on a single language point.Also,most of the participants are college students.Striving to provide some empirical evidence on the effectiveness of teacher WCF,this study attempted to explore the effects of two different types of teacher CF(direct WCF with teacher-student conferencing and underlined indirect WCF with error coding)on senior high school students'accuracy of prepositions in English writingThis study involved 60 students of Grade Two from a senior high school in Suzhou Industrial Park.According to the overall English scores in the first-stage test and error rate of prepositions in the writing(pretest),all participants were divided into two groups with equivalent writing proficiency,each group consisting of 15 high-achievers and 15 underachievers.One group received direct WCF with teacher-student conferencing,that is,the teacher directly pointed out and corrected the error and gave the students some examples which contained the same error for students to correct in the conference;and the other group received underlined indirect WCF with error coding,that is,the teacher underlined the error and gave the error code beside the error for students' self-correction.This experiment lasted for 7 weeks,during which participants were asked to complete 7 writings(excluding the pretest),6 of which were used for feedback training.That is,students completed the first draft and handed it in to the teacher for corresponding feedback,and then the students revised it.The error rates of prepositions in the pretest and the posttest were counted and compared.The obtained data was entered into SPSS 22.0 for analysis and research.The major findings are summarized as follows:Firstly,both types of teacher CF adopted in this study effectively improved the accuracy of prepositions in writing,and effects of the two feedback methods were generally equivalentSecondly,the effects of the two types of teacher CF on improving the accurate use of prepositions in writing for students of different proficiency levels were different.For high-achievers,both of the feedback methods could improve the accuracy in prepositions in their writings,but for underachievers,direct WCF with teacher-student conferencing could effectively improve their accurate use of prepositions in writing On the contrary,underlined indirect WCF with error coding did not significantly enhance the accuracy of prepositions in their writing.This study provides empirical support for the effectiveness of teacher CF on the significant improvement in the accurate use of prepositions in writing for Chinese senior high school students.In addition,it also provides pedagogical implication for senior high school English teachers in implementing more effective feedback methods in writing teaching.