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An Experimental Study On The Effects Of The Teacher's Direct Feedback And Metalinguistic Feedback On Middle School Students' Writing Accuracy And Repair Rates

Posted on:2021-01-16Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X M XuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2415330614957109Subject:Subject teaching
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Writing,one of the four basic skills in English learning,is usually considered as the most difficult one for foreign language learners to grasp.With the development of interaction hypothesis in English pedagogy,the teacher's oral corrective feedback has received more and more attention in writing instruction.It is hypothesized in discourse analysis theory and input theory that oral corrective feedback can facilitate multiple rounds of interaction between teachers and students to help students be more aware of the gap between their own language output and the target language.However,various oral feedback methods have exerted different degrees of influences on the promotion of interaction.Therefore,there is no consensus among researchers on which feedback method is more conducive to better writing.The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback on the writing accuracy and repair rates of middle school students at different English levels.This research tries to answer three questions:(1)For students of different levels(high and low levels),what effects do direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback have on their writing accuracy? If so,what are the differences?(2)For these students,what effects do direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback have on writing repair rates? If so,what are the differences?(3)For these students,do the two types of oral corrective feedback have delayed effects on the student's writing accuracy and repair rates? If so,what are the differences?The experiment was conducted for around three months.Fifty eight students in Grade Nine from a middle school in Hangzhou were picked in the research according to their average scores of two English tests,of which 28 and 30 were from two classes respectively,and they were further divided into high and low level groups equally based on their writing scores and English scores of the first monthly examination.The teacher provided direct feedback in one class with corrections directly;in the other class,the teacher offered metalinguistic feedback and gave metalinguistic explanations to promote students' self-repair without any correct language forms.Various research instruments were applied in this study such as questionnaire,pretest,writing practice,and delayed posttest: the purpose of the questionnaire is to understand the situation of other factors that may affect the results of the experiment;the pretest aims to detect the differences in accuracy and repair rates of participants at the same level group before the experiment and the goal of delayed posttest is to investigate the delayed effects of different oral corrective feedback on writing.Through the comparisons of the error numbers and repair rates in the compositions between high-level and low-level groups,the impacts of different feedback types on middle school students' writing accuracy and repair rates at different levels were analyzed.In addition,the delayed effects of different feedback on writing accuracy and repair rates of different error types were compared by correlating error numbers and repair rates in the delayed posttest.Data from the questionnaire and compositions were analyzed by SPSS 20.0.The results showed that both direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback could improve middle school students' English writing accuracy and repair rates.As far as accuracy is concerned,both feedback methods help improve writing accuracy of high-level and low-level learners,but direct feedback has a more significant impact on writing accuracy.In addition,the two types have positive delayed effects on students' writing accuracy and direct feedback is more effective.As far as repair rates are concerned,the two types of feedback have positive immediate influences on repair rates but significant differences only occur in the comparison of delayed effects.When the comparison of effects is conducted between the pretest and the writing three,it is found that students in the group at high level with metalinguistic feedback(HM)make progress about 12.4% in mean repair rate while students in the group at high level with direct feedback(HD)make no progress.As for low-level students,students in the group at low level with direct feedback(LD)make improvement about 15.1% in the mean repair rate and students in the group at low level with metalinguistic feedback(LM)9.1% in the writing three.When it comes to the delayed impacts on high-level students,metalinguistic feedback has significant delayed effects on their total repair rates and repair rates of grammatical errors,and it has a better effect on the repair rates of lexical errors than direct feedback.For low-level students,the delayed effects of two types of feedback on their total repair rates are not significant,whereas metalinguistic feedback has a significant effect on the repair in lexicon,and direct feedback helps to correct grammatical errors but it works less effectively than metalinguistic feedback.Furthermore,the impacts of the two feedback methods on mechanism errors of students at different levels remain unclear.It is concluded that the teacher should provide students with different feedback according to their language levels,and give more appropriate feedback based on the type of errors.
Keywords/Search Tags:teacher's oral corrective feedback, interaction hypothesis, metalinguistic feedback, direct feedback, English writing
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