A Study Of Teacher Feedback In Grade Three Of Selected Senior Middle Schools Efl Writing In Urumqi

Feedback, as a way for language learners to get the assessment about their learning behavior in the previous period, is an essential procedure of the writing process. From 1990s on, teacher feedback, with the purpose of providing input information for the student to enhance students'learning, has been paid more and more attention. Informative teacher feedback can not only give students suggestions to make modification, but also reinforce their motivation so that students'ability of self-studying may be cultivated. For English teachers,"how does the teacher feedback become informative"turns into a crucial issue.This study, taking senior middle school teachers and students of Urumqi as subjects, highlights the present situation of teacher feedback in the process of writing instruction and students'perception and preference of teacher feedback. And some suggestions have been provided with the hope that when teachers give instructions, they take the research result, suggestion as well as the condition and attitude of their students into consideration, and also make reflection of their instruction behavior.The result of teacher questionnaire shows that teachers pay much attention to the importance of the teacher feedback; the most frequent way of teacher feedback is handwriting-feedback one by one (81.8%); as for the way of error correction, 63.6% of teachers use"marking all of the errors and correcting parts of them"; the content of comments is mainly about grammar and vocabulary (45.5%), but the comment about the content of students'writing is rare.The result of the student questionnaire shows that the present situation of teacher feedback reported by the students is generally in accordance with that of teachers, such as the way of teachers'correction that students expect and the self-assessment of the teacher. But in the aspect of marking and way of error correction, students'expectation does not coincide with that of teachers.The result of samples of students'writing shows that the most frequent way of teacher feedback is handwriting-feedback one by one and giving a total mark; teachers pay more attention to correct students'grammar,vocabulary errors---70.9% of the student receive teacher feedback about their grammar and vocabulary errors, but the percentage of this aspect getting from teacher questionnaire is 54.5%, which shows that English teachers underestimate their attention which they pay to the grammar and vocabulary errors; for the comment of teacher feedback, the content of 85.5% comment is about grammar and vocabulary, which is different from that of teacher questionnaire (45.5%). Therefore, English teachers underestimate the degree of their focus on the grammar and vocabulary errors in their comments.After data analysis, the results show that the feedback provided by teachers roughly cater for the demands of students, but there are some differences between teachers'self-assessment and their actual behavior, such as their over-evaluating the ways of feedback they provided, which is unfavorable for students'gumption. In teachers'practice, the way of teacher feedback adopted by teachers is simplex (such as the way of error correction), and teachers do not pay special attention to characteristics of different type of students. So teachers should pay more attention to their students'characteristics and try to find a better way for their English writing instruction.