A Study On The Application Of Corrective Feedback In Teaching Senior High School English Writing

Corrective feedback has aroused heated discussions in the field of second language acquisition and classroom teaching in recent years and has obtained some achievements at home and abroad. Previous studies have explored the effect of different corrective feedback on English writing and the findings revealed that different kinds of corrective feedback played a profound role in English writing teaching. Related studies have carried out in universities and senior high schools; however, most of the studies that carried out in the senior high schools employed only the way of questionnaire.This study is on the basis of the previous studies and three theoretical bases—Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis. Meanwhile, this study is an empirical study and is carried out in the context of senior high school, the participants of which are Grade 1 senior high school students. This study aims to investigate the effects of three kinds of corrective feedback(direct corrective feedback, indirect corrective feedback and metalinguistic corrective feedback) on teaching senior high school English writing in order to provide some pedagogical implications and to increase the effect of senior high school English writing teaching.The research questions of this study are as follows:(1) Do direct corrective feedback, indirect corrective feedback and metalinguistic corrective feedback have the effect on English writing of senior high school students? If they do, which kind of corrective feedback contributes positive effect to learners’ English writing more dramatically?(2) Do direct corrective feedback, indirect corrective feedback and metalinguistic corrective feedback have the effect on the English writing scores of senior high school students?(3) What are the attitudes of the senior high school students toward direct corrective feedback, indirect corrective feedback and metalinguistic corrective feedback?90 participants were selected from No. 1 Middle School in Mengcheng County, Anhui Province and they were assigned to group A, group B and group C through pre-test. In addition, the mean scores of the students in three groups were almost the same. Based on the classification of corrective feedback of Rod Ellis(2009), group A used the method of direct corrective feedback in which the teacher corrected the errors of the students in a direct way; group B employed the indirect corrective feedback method, indicating plus locating the errors to give the students their feedbacks; group C was defined as the metacognitive corrective feedback group, using error codes. Before the experiment, the researcher conducted a questionnaire among the participated students which tended to collect the information about the current situation of corrective feedback in senior high school and the attitudes of students toward corrective feedback. This study lasted for 16 weeks, during which each student finished six argumentative writing assignments. At the end of the experiment, a post-test was conducted among the three groups. The finished writing assignments of the students were corrected by the three teachers who had examined English writing of college entrance examinations of Anhui Province several times. The mean score of the three teachers’ was treated as the score of each writing assignment. Four students were selected randomly as interviewees from group A, B and C respectively to participate in the interview after the post-test and they were asked some questions about their views of the teachers’ corrective feedback.From data analysis, the findings of this study are as follows:First, the three kinds of corrective feedback have positive effect on English writing of senior high school students, but to different extent. Besides, among the three kinds of corrective feedback, findings revealed that indirect corrective feedback contributed to English writing dramatically compared with the other two groups.Second, the three kinds of corrective feedback also have effect on the English writing scores of senior high school students in a positive way but differential effects are found. In addition, the score of students in indirect corrective feedback group increased dramatically.Third, judging from the questionnaire and the interview, most of the students admitted the effectiveness of corrective feedback; however, they held some different opinions compared with the real practice of the teacher. Consequently, the corrective feedback in senior high school should make some adjustment to the needs of the students in order to increase the level of English writing in senior high school.Furthermore, considering how to offer corrective feedback in English teaching, more pedagogical implications are provided. First, the quality of the feedback cannot be ignored; second, it is suggested that teachers should provide more appropriate indirect corrective feedback; third, in ESL teaching, corrective feedback in the aspect of content area should be paid more attention to; fourth, the attitudes of the students toward corrective feedback should be taken into consideration when corrective feedback is given.