A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Reformulation And Metalinguistic Feedback On College English Writing

With the acceleration of economic globalization and internationalization of higher education,English writing has become an indispensable means of international exchanges.What follows is that cultivating college students' English writing ability becomes not only an essential task of college English teaching,but also a research focus of second language writing teaching.With the studies on written feedback conducted in depth,reformulation and metalinguistic feedback have become the heated topics in the field of second language writing teaching.The bunk of studies has been investigated on reformulation and metalinguistic feedback abroad,but domestic studies on these two types of feedback are relatively scarce.Additionally,it has been underexplored as to the differential effects between reformulation and metalinguistic feedback on English writing.In light of previous studies,inspired from the studies of Sachs and Polio(2007)and Diab(2015),this study is conducted,aiming to investigate the effects of reformulation and metalinguistic feedback on college students' English writing firstly,then the study attempts to extend the existing research by further exploring whether there are differential effects between reformulation and metalinguistic feedback on college English writing,and trying to find out effective methods of English writing instruction.This study focuses on the following four questions:(1)What effects does reformulation have on college students' English writing performance?(2)What effects does metalinguistic feedback have on college students' English writing performance?(3)Are there any differences between the effects of reformulation and metalinguistic feedback on college students' English writing performance? If yes,what are they?(4)What do college students think of reformulation and metalinguistic feedback?In order to answer the above questions,on the basis of the Input Hypothesis,the Noticing Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis,this study takes reformulation and metalinguistic feedback as theoretical instruction.Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to explain,validate and complement the data.The experiment is conducted in a university in Northeast China.The subjects are freshmen from three classes,who are consistent with overall English proficiency after College English Placement Test.Moreover,data from pretest have proved that there is no significant difference among them in English writing performance.Furthermore,students are randomly divided into three groups: reformulation group,metalinguistic feedback group and control group.The total scores and analytic scores in pretest and post-test are analyzed with the help of SPSS 24.0.The questionnaires and interviews are to solicit students' opinions regarding reformulation and metalinguistic feedback,which are also collected and analyzed later.The major findings are presented as follows.Firstly,reformulation improves students' overall English writing performance significantly.Specifically,students in reformulation group has noticeable improvement in language use,vocabulary and mechanics.Secondly,metalinguistic feedback improves students' overall English writing performance significantly as well.Students receiving metalinguistic feedback make prominent progress in language use and mechanics.They do improve in vocabulary but not significantly.Thirdly,generally speaking,even though reformulation and metalinguistic feedback are both effective in improving students' overall English writing performance,there is no observable difference between two experimental groups.However,when it comes to specific aspects,in terms of vocabulary,students given reformulation outperform those in metalinguistic feedback group obviously.With respect to the improvement of language use,the advantage of metalinguistic feedback is found to be more evident.As to mechanics,there is no difference between two experimental groups.Finally,from students' perspective,most students in two experimental groups show positive attitudes towards reformulation and metalinguistic feedback,holding that two types of feedback help them a lot in language use,vocabulary and mechanics in English writing to different extent.Students also provide some suggestions on the feedback they receive.This study provides some implications for college English writing teaching.Firstly,both reformulation and metalanguage feedback should be paid enough attention to writing teaching since they all contribute to the enhancement of students' English writing.Secondly,the selection of teaching strategies should be flexible and should make full use of the respective advantages of reformulation and metalinguistic feedback to improve students' English writing accordingly.Thirdly,students' opinions of English writing should be developed in such aspects as the usage of vocabulary being changed from simple stacking to idiomaticity and richness,and the expression of sentence constructions being altered from simplicity to diversity and complexity.Finally,considering that the current language proficiency of students is not at advanced level,which is not up to the higher order English writing teaching concerning content and text layout,this study concentrates on providing feedback in the aspect of language form,hoping that future studies can be explored from the perspective of content and organization.