A Study On The Application Of Teacher’s Written Corrective Feedback To Junior High School English Writing

In second language(L2)writing,written corrective feedback(WCF)is a process of correcting and giving feedback on students’ output,which is part and parcel to English language teaching.Most teachers of a second or foreign language believe that one of their responsibilities is to provide their L2 students with WCF on the errors they make in their writing.For students,it is another opportunity to obtain linguistic knowledge input supplementary to their direct linguistic exposure in the classroom.Researches on WCF have undergone a shift of research aims from attesting its effectiveness in the outset,to comparing its relative effectiveness and ultimately to probing into how to make WCF more effective.Previous studies have made some achievement in these aspects but as the issue of making WCF more effective,both the quantity and the depth obtained are far from adequate.In particular,the issue of how to give students more effective feedback in terms of their language proficiency is worthy of more research efforts.The majority of researchers have chosen to investigate the effects of focused correction,which only persistently targets one problematic error type at a time.However,it has been criticized for the lack of ecological validity,inconsistent with the actual situation of composition correction.This study focuses on all linguistic errors and takes into account junior high school students’ language proficiency to further explore how to give them more effective feedback.The study selected 93 junior high school students as participants at a school in Xu Hui District,Shanghai.A pretest,a post-test and a delayed post-test were conducted to examine the participants’ linguistic accuracy under different feedback conditions.A series of analyses were carried out on the collected data.Successively,a language proficiency test is employed to investigate the relationship between students’ language proficiency and efficacy of WCF.What’s more,an interview is designed and conducted to obtain more information about students’ views on their writing improvement and different kinds of teacher feedback.The results reveal that: First,WCF is conducive to students’ linguistic accuracy in writing tasks.Both direct feedback only and direct feedback with meta-linguistic explanation(ME)investigated do have significant differences in their effects but the effect of the latter seems to be longer lasting.Second,students’ language proficiency is found to be positively correlated to the effect of direct feedback with ME.Third,direct feedback with ME better suits both students with high language proficiency and low language proficiency than direct feedback only in short-term and long-term period.This study is expected to help English teachers to provide more effective written feedback on writing instruction in junior high school.