An Action Research On The Implementation Of Genre-based Teacher Feedback

Writing has always been believed to be the most difficult language skill for EFL learners.Argumentative writing,as one of the most common writing genres,has inevitably been a key point in the field of EFL writing research.Teacher feedback,as an important link of writing teaching,has been attached great importance to in the past 30 years.However,most related studies tend to categorize the teacher feedback into form-based feedback and meaning-based feedback,focusing on the effect on the language accuracy,complexity,content and so on,while few is concerned with the role of genre concept in teacher feedback.Recently,as a hot topic in the field of linguistics and second language acquisition,genre and genre-based teaching approach has been proved effective by many scholars.But most of the research focus on instructional design in classroom,its application in feedback has just begun to attract scholars’ attention,and relevant researches need to be further enriched.Based on Hyland’s genre description of argumentative essays,guided by the noticing hypothesis theory and interaction hypothesis theory,the study takes 70 students as research participants from two natural classes of senior English majors in College of Foreign Languages of a local university in Shandong Province.Adopting action research as the main research method,not only qualitative tools such as interviews and classroom observations,which are commonly used in action research but also quantitative research methods were used to conduct statistical analysis on students’ performance in several writing tasks.The study attempts to explore how to implement the genre-based teacher feedback in argumentative writing teaching for English majors.Specifically,it tries to answer two research questions:(1)How do college English teachers implement genre-based teacher feedback?(2)What changes does English majors have in their argumentative writing after the implementation of genre-based teacher feedback? Is the feedback effective?The research results show that:(1)The genre-based teacher feedback is mainly carried out from seven dimensions: structure integrity,summary accuracy,claim rationality,support sufficiency,essay logicality,language accuracy,cohesion and coherence.In written feedback,these seven dimensions are evenly distributed,mostly in the way of pointing out problems,explaining the problems and putting forward suggestions for modification,but several dimensions related to the characteristics of argumentative genre appear more frequently than the other dimensions.Comparatively speaking,in oral feedback,the seven dimensions are distributed rather out of balance,in the form of presenting typical problems,giving the explanation and relevant cases,where only the dimensions “summary accuracy”,“claim rationality”and “support sufficiency” are more emphasized than the others.(2)After two rounds of implementation of genre-based teacher feedback,the overall performance of English majors’ argumentative writing has been changed significantly in that students’ scores are distributed intensively around 80 points.Specially,students’ progresses made in dimensions of structure integrity and rationality of claims are more obvious than in the others.Nevertheless,students make less progress in terms of “essay logicality”,“cohesion and coherence” and other dimensions after two rounds of action,the number of students scoring more than 90 points is still extremely low.Therefore,the genre-based teacher feedback is proved to be effective in improving the English majors’ performance in argumentative essay writing,but there is still much room for improvement.Based on the results,the study would give the following suggestions:(1)Teachers should emphasize the typical characteristics of argumentative genre while giving feedback.(2)Teachers should give students feedback as clearly and amply as possible,so as to help the students understand their problems more specifically.(3)Communication and cooperation in course planning for English majors should be strengthened for the purpose of intensifying language input and enhancing students’ ability of argumentative essay writing.On the whole,the study has basically achieved its expected goals,and the results are generally satisfactory,in that it has enriched the application of the concept of genre and related theories in English writing,with some useful suggestions for the implementation of genre-based teacher feedback.However,due to the limitation of time and the author’s individual academic ability,there are still some shortcomings that need to be made up in the following areas:(1)The genre-based evaluation dimension for argumentative essay used in feedback’s implementation in this study is designed by the author herself,which is not necessarily accurate and comprehensive enough,waiting for the criticism and correction from the experts and professors urgently.(2)Limited by college normal teaching order,the duration of the study is short and the writing tasks are few.In the future,the research results’ reliability can be improved by extending the research time and adding more writing tasks.