A Study On Senior High School English Teachers’ Beliefs And Practice In Written Corrective Feedback

For decades,written corrective feedback(WCF)has sparked heated discussion in the field of language acquisition.Teachers strategically provide different WCF for different students’ writings with the aim of helping language learners realize the gap between their interlanguage and target language and thus improving their overall writing capacity.At1990 s and 2000 s,Truscott and Ferris constantly argued about the effectiveness of WCF,stirring up extensive research on WCF at home and abroad.Although Truscott insisted that WCF was ineffective or even harmful,more subsequent studies shown that WCF significantly improved language learners’ writing ability.After that,the research focus in recent years turned to which type of WCF was more helpful to language learners.During this process,only a few scholars have paid enough attention to the decisive role of teachers’ belief and practice.However,among the limited studies on teachers’ belief and practice in corrective feedback,most participants were university teachers and students,and the research methods were overwhelmingly quantitative.In addition,in different teaching backgrounds,relevant studies remained conflicting and inconclusive about whether teachers’ WCF beliefs are consistent with their WCF practices.Therefore,this study investigated senior high English teachers’ WCF beliefs and practice by a mixed-method.Hopefully,this study could enrich the existing relevant research and serve as a reference for the contradictory findings.From the dimensions of mode,extent and focus,this study aims to describe senior high English teachers’ WCF beliefs and practice as well as to explore the(in)consistency between the beliefs and practice.The study selected 5 English teachers from a key high school in Wuhan as participants and employed compositions,questionnaires and semistructured interviews as instruments,answering the following three research questions:(1)With respect to mode,extent and focus,what WCF beliefs do senior high English teachers hold?(2)With respect to mode,extent and focus,what kinds of WCF do senior high English teachers provide in practice?(3)To what degree are their practice consistent with their beliefs,and what are the influencing factors?The major findings are as follows:(1)From the angles of mode,extent and focus,senior high English teachers believed that their WCF practice actually depended on workload,error type,student proficiency and politeness.(2)Senior high English teachers mainly provided direct,local and comprehensive WCF.(3)Teachers’ WCF beliefs generally aligned with their WCF practice in terms of mode and extent,whereas a large degree of inconsistency was found from the aspect of focus.The influencing factors were chiefly workload,error type,students’ level of English proficiency and politeness.Based on the findings,teachers are recommended to rethink their WCF beliefs and practice,increase students’ comprehension on the provided WCF and actively participate in professional training so as to further improve the effectiveness of WCF.