The Influence Of Teachers' Written Feedback On Junior High School Students' English Writing

Writing is not only a comprehensive and practical language skill,but also reflects a person's language proficiency.As a commonly used feedback method in writing teaching,teacher's written feedback has attracted many researchers' attention.Students at junior middle schools are in the initial stage of learning English writing,so exploring the effective ways of teacher's written feedback is particularly important to improve students' writing quality.However,few relative studies are available.As such,it is necessary to carry out a study in this aspect.Based on mediation theory and output hypothesis,the current study uses experimental and text analysis methods to investigate the impact of written feedback on students' essays.This study includes two sections.The first section is an investigative study.In order to summarize what kinds of written feedback the teacher commonly used in teaching,author collects and analyzes 825 essays corrected by 55 English teachers at junior middle school in 11 cities.With the common types of written feedback available,an experimental study is conducted in the second section.This experimental study lasts for 13 weeks and takes 40 students in the grade eight of a Middle School in Dezhou as subjects.They are divided into several groups according to the feedback types,each with one type of feedback for experiment,and each student is required to complete 7 compositions.The present experimental study aims to explore the effect of different types of teacher's written feedback on students' writing at junior middle school.The main findings of the study are as follows.Firstly,there are four types of written feedback which are commonly used by English teachers in junior middle school,namely “corrective feedback”,“line indicating feedback”,“words indicating feedback” and “rewriting feedback”.Secondly,these four types of teacher's written feedback have positive but different influences on the structure,content,grammar,vocabulary and technical details of the composition.Specifically,among the four feedback types,“words indicating feedback” has more obvious impact on structure,grammar(e.g.,third-person singular,tense)and technical details than others;“Corrective feedback” and “rewriting feedback” are more effective in improving sentence structure of grammar and corrective feedback have relatively remarkable effect on vocabulary(e.g.,fixed collocations and phrases);The four types of written feedback have no obvious effect on vocabulary(e.g.,synonyms and homomorphous words),but they all have a good effect on content;From the perspective of students' attitude to modify compositions,“words indicating feedback” has the best effect on arousing students' enthusiasm and initiative in revising compositions,however,few students make active modification under “corrective feedback” and “rewriting feedback”.Based on the major findings of the study,the following teaching suggestions are put forward.Firstly,teacher should avoid using a single way of feedback when assessing students' compositions.In particular,making a date mark or a check mark should be avoided during assessing students' writing.Secondly,teacher should provide various forms of communication with students to make them fully understand how to modify the compositions.Furthermore,teacher should add more practice of abstracting the theme of essay in class.Finally,When assessing students' compositions,teacher should pay attention to technical details,reminding students of the details carefully.Although this study has some limitations for shot experiment time and the single level of the subjects,it has reached its expected goal.It is hoped that the findings of this study can provide reference and enlightenment for teaching practice and further studies.