The Effectiveness Of Teacher Written Corrective Feedback On Non-english Majors’ English Writing

The present study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of teacher written CFon Non-English major college students’ English writing. Specifically, it examinedwhether teacher written corrective feedback is helpful to improve students’self-correction ability, language accuracy and writing quality over time?The study is based on Error Analysis, Noticing Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis.This empirical research was carried out in Shangluo University for12weeks, in thefall semester2012. The subjects were the freshmen students from two intact classes atthe same level. One class was chosen randomly as the Experimental Group (n=50),and the other was the Control Group (n=48). All the two groups were required to write6compositions. The differences were that the Experimental Group received theteacher’s corrective feedback for every composition they wrote, and were asked tocorrect their errors in a15-minute session of class time, while for the control group, nocorrective feedback was offered. From the data collected from students’ first and lastcomposition, students’ self-correction ability, language accuracy and quality wereevaluated rigorously and objectively. Through Independent-Samples T Test andPaired-Samples T Test, both pretests&posttests and EG&CG were analyzed and thefollowing results were obtained. Before the experiment, no significant difference wasfound between the experimental and control group in students’ self-correction ability,language accuracy, and quality. But, after12weeks of experiment, the experimentalgroup outperformed control group.On the basis of the findings of this study, this paper further discussed itsimplications. In the end, the limitations of the study and the future researchsuggestions are offered.