An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Teachers' Written Corrective Feedback On Syntactic Complexity Of English Majors' Writing

This thesis aims at exploring the effects of teachers' written corrective feedback on syntactic complexity of English majors' writing.In recent years,English writing teaching has been closely related to the process-oriented approach.Feedback,as one of the important aspects in the process-oriented approach,has gradually come to researchers' extensive attention at home and abroad.Most studies have focused on the effects of feedback on writing accuracy or fluency,but the study of syntactic complexity is relatively inadequate.In addition,studies on the effects of teachers' written corrective feedback on the syntactic complexity of English majors' writing are rather limited.Thus,this empirical study is designed to demonstrate the effects of different types of teachers' written corrective feedback on syntactic complexity of English majors' writing.Based on Comprehensible Input Hypothesis,Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Noticing/Attention Hypothesis,this thesis attempts to explore the following two research questions:(1)Which measures of syntactic complexity are significantly effected by teachers' written corrective feedback?(2)What is the correlation between significantly effected measures andEnglish majors' writing scores?The experiment lasted for 8 weeks.The research subjects of this study were 60 English majors from two natural classes from a college in Changsha,Hunan Province.And the subjects were sorted into direct group and indirect group in accordance with different types of feedback that they received,with30 in each group.The research instruments of this study were writing tests and Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA).The data were issued with correlation analysis and independent sample T-tests by social science statistical software SPSS 21.0.The results show that(1)different types of teachers' written corrective feedback have different effects on syntactic complexity.Seven measures of syntactic complexity are significantly effected by direct feedback.They are respectively MLC,MLS,MLT,DC/T,CN/C,CN/T,and VP/T.When English majors receive indirect feedback,there are significant differences in six measures of syntactic complexity which are MLT,C/S,DC/T,CP/C,CP/T and T/S.Only MLT and DC/T are always significantly effected by direct feedback and indirect feedback.(2)It displays that among seven measures significantly effected by direct feedback,four measures including MLT,DC/T,CN/C,and CN/T significantly correlate with English majors' writing scores.Furthermore,it demonstrates that among six measures significantly effected by indirect feedback,four measures consisting of MLT,C/S,DC/T,and T/S significantly correlate with English majors' writing scores.There are still some shortcomings in this study such as the small sample size and a short experimental period.This study also suggests that teachers should make full use of written corrective feedback in English teaching.Teachers should enhance students' self-confidence and improve their writing abilities through feedback.