A Study Of Effective Strategies Of Feedback In High School English Writing Teaching From The Perspective Of Constructivism

Writing is of vital importance in English learning and teaching. However, despite the great endeavor of teachers and students, high school students keep in low English writing proficiency and gradually lose their interest in it. The non-ideal status of high school English writing urges more and more researchers to do lots of studies, aiming to improve students’writing efficiently. More and more people focus their attention on writing feedback, because they believe the exploration of effective strategies can enhance students’ writing level. While the current situation of writing feedback is that: on the one hand, teacher feedback tends to be time-consuming and ineffective; on the other hand, peer feedback has not been implemented in most English writing classroom yet. On the basis of the analysis of the present situation of high school English writing feedback, this thesis adapts constructivism as its research perspective, trying to explore the effective feedback strategies for high school English writing teaching from the four aspects—sources of feedback, focuses of feedback, error feedback and comment style.Constructivism, which emerged in the field of psychology at first, is widely applied in education nowadays. Constructivism supports the learner-centered learning under the help of teacher within ZPD. It is centered on the knowledge-construction process. Based on constructivist theory, the thesis explores the constructivism-based strategies of feedback:(1) combination of teacher feedback and trained peer feedback;(2) paying equal attention to content-focused feedback and form-focused feedback;(3) indirect error correction within students’ZPD;(4) offer of comments balancing praise, criticism and suggestion.In order to test the effectiveness of the constructivism-based strategies of writing feedback and collect students’attitudes toward the various strategies of feedback, this thesis carries out an experiment between an experiment class and a control class in one high school in Nan Yang for16weeks. The experiment class received the feedback with constructivism-based strategies, while the control class received the feedback with traditional strategies.The students were required to write8essays in this semester and fill in the questionnaire at the end of the semester. The results of the marks of students’last-term final English exam and essay1,2and8were collected and analyzed (including holistic and analytic scoring) by SPSS software to find out whether students’writing proficiency in the experiment class was significantly improved. Besides, the questionnaire was also employed to gather information on students’views and insights on the feedback they’ve received this semester.The major findings are:(1) Constrnetivion-based strategies of feedback is more effective in improving students’ English writing level;(2) The majority of students take positive attitude toward the constructivism-based strategies of feedback. Apart from summarizing the major findings, the last part also points out the pedagogical implications, limitations of the study, also the suggestions for future study.