| For years,written corrective feedback(WCF)has remained an extensively studied and hotly debated topic for research and frontier writing teachers in the fields of second language(L2)writing and second language acquisition.Although research has yielded deep insights about how to provide teacher WCF in L2 writing classrooms,such notion has failed to filter to feedback from peers to influence students' writing achievements,the primary yardsticks for which,in the realm of L2 writing research,are complexity,accuracy and fluency(CAF),among which,however,written complexity has been neglected by researchers and scholars on account of its separation from the writing assessment system in China which centers on the fluency and accuracy of written output.In recent years,increasing attention has been paid to investigating complexity and thus various exploratory studies have been conducted.Nevertheless,little research has investigated the effects of two types of WCF on lower proficiency(LP)students' written syntactic complexity development in EFL writing classes.Focusing on this important topic in L2 writing,in order to know more about LP students' writing complexity development after receiving WCF,the present study traced the trajectory of syntactic complexity changes of argumentation written by 101 participants from two classes at a learning-oriented high school in Jiangxi Province by analyzing 202 essays collected within a 17-week training,coupled with questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview.It aims to explore which type of WCF,teacher or peer,exerts greater influence on written syntactic complexity development and students' perceptions and attitude towards the two kinds of WCF.Two classes responded to two distinct WCF with the comparison class receiving a conventional teacher WCF and the experimental peer WCF.Participants were required to compose an essay every two weeks and totally 8 writing tasks within a semester and altogether202 compositions were collected to analyze.The writing topics and argumentative genre were chosen by the researcher.With data collection finished,the researcher utilized 14 indexes to calculate the written syntactic complexity through SPSS 23.0.The study has found that,the comparison class outperformed the experimental one in the aspect of writing,generated more diverse language forms and displayed enhanced syntactic features.It should be noted that the backwash of high-stakes tests may leadto a better performance in response to conventional teacher WCF.It has also found that students' lower English language proficiency may positively influence their perceptions and attitude towards WCF and cause imbalances among teacher and peer WCF.The findings are conductive to an awareness of the multiple perspectives of LP students' written syntactic complexity development with WCF.Based on the above findings,some major implications will be provided for improving the effectiveness of WCF practices.We recommend that WCF is judiciously provided to LP students and pay special attention to the explicitness of WCF.Then,raters should explain feedback to LP students to reduce their confusion and improve their cognitive engagement by adding the written explanations following their indirect feedback.Subsequently,teacher should conduct some training for the students on how and to what extent the essays should be evaluated and reviewed effectively,as well as guide students to work in groups to examine the received feedback from multiple perspectives.Above all,there is a need for writing teachers to encourage student learners to create more complex or diversified syntactic structures in their prospective writing practice.Actually,writing is aimed to enable learners to voice themselves with freedom instead of being restricted by the accuracy-based notion. |
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