The Effect Of Two Types Of Teacher Feedback On The Predicate Accuracy In Senior Middle Students' English Writing

In English writing teaching, teacher feedback has long been a controversial topic. Some researches showed that it was useless, while others found it worthwhile. A large percentage of the researches concerning teacher feedback have mainly focused on comparing the effects on students'overall writing accuracy between giving feedback or not, or between direct and different indirect teacher feedback types, And most researches found that indirect teacher feedback was more effective in improving students'writing. In this study, the two kinds of teacher feedback:direct feedback and indirect feedback are also compared, but with something new added, that is , direct teacher feedback plus teacher-student individual conference, indirect teacher feedback with marginal explanation. The research questions in this study are: (1) Are the two kinds of teacher feedback in this study (direct feedback plus teacher-student conference feedback; indirect feedback consisting of underlining the errors and marginal explanations) effective in improving senior middle students'predicate accuracy in English writing?(2) Are there differences between the effects of the two types of teacher feedback? If yes, which one is better? (3) What are the separate effects of the two types of teacher feedback on the three frequently-made error types (errors concerning the subject-predicate agreement, model verbs and tense and aspect)?The study was done in a senior middle school with 56 students, divided into EG and CG, from two intact classes as its participants. The experiment lasted for three months, during which the participants were asked to write five compositions, and to rewrite the compositions according to the different types of teacher feedback: EG with direct teacher feedback plus teacher-student individual conference, CG with indirect teacher feedback and marginal explanation. Among the five compositions, the first one, the third one and the fifth one were selected, and the accuracy of the predicate of each composition for the two groups was got and compared. The results showed that the two types of teacher feedback were both effective in improving the students'predicate accuracy in English writing and direct feedback plus teacher-student individual conference proved better. Concerning the three frequently-made error types, the two types were both effective in improving the writing accuracy of subject-predicate agreement and model verbs, but ineffective as far as tense and aspect was concerned.This study is significant to some extent in English writing teaching, but more kinds of teacher feedback concerning more error types were needed in future study.