A Case Study On Students’ Reactions To And Preferences For Teachers’ Written Feedback In The EFL Writing Of Senior High School

Teachers written feedback is an inseparable part of English writing instruction, aswell as a communication bridge between teachers and students. In recent a few decades,relevant researches have sprung up at home and abroad. Most of the researches abroadare set in an ESL context, and considering the important role contextual factors play inlanguage research, studies set in an EFL context would present their own characteristics.Therefore, conducting research on students reactions to and preferences for teachers written feedback under a senior high school background at home is the target of thepresent study.The participants include95students from two classes of Senior Grade Two andthree English teachers of the same grade in Chengdu Economic and TechnologicalDevelopment Zone Experimental High School. It undergoes two and a half months(from September,2013to mid-November,2013) and five compositions are collected assamples from every participant and in total424compositions are gathered. Otherquantitative and qualitative data, such as student questionnaires, student interview andteacher interview are also collected. The present study is mainly involved with threequestions: the status-quo of teachers written feedback; students attitudes towards andpreferences for teachers written feedback; the pedagogical implications for English writing practice.The major findings suggest: firstly, in terms of the status-quo of teachers writtenfeedback, five mechanisms are used to provide feedback and they are mostly focused ongrammar and vocabulary. On the other side, students subsequent revision rate is of arather low level. Secondly, regarding students preferences for teachers writtenfeedback, grammar-focused feedback is welcomed and the majority of participantslargely rely on teachers help; in addition, participants hope teachers indicate all theerrors with a mixture of different feedback mechanisms but only selectively correctsemantic issues, and the participants top two expected feedbacks are grades andcommentaries, for affective considerations.Three pedagogical implications are brought up: to begin with, teachers are advisedto keep balance between grammatical feedback and content feedback; in the secondplace, teachers are supposed to cultivate students autonomy. Peer evaluation andself-edition are suggested to be adopted as complements to teachers written feedback;as for feedback mechanisms, teachers are advised to combine indirect feedback andselective corrections together. Besides, teachers are suggested to keep providing modeltexts for students to learn useful expressions and sentence structures, as well as try totake advantage of commentaries and grades to stimulate students motivation andinterests in English writing.In the end, the present study is expected to achieve theoretical and practical values.The findings validate the statement supported by scholars led by Dana Ferris that it ismeaningful to provide corrective feedback for students drafts, and therefore, this studyadds another empirical evidence for the relevant research bases. At the same time, thewriting instruction is a vital as well as a difficult part in English teaching practice, soimproving the efficacy of teachers written feedback is expected to be of some practicalreferences for the EFL writing instruction in the senior high school.