Effects Of Teacher Written Feedback On English Writing In Senior High School:A Case Study

Writing, as a basic skill of language learning, is the concentrated embodiment of language learners’ comprehensive abilities. Current English writing teaching has many problems, so how to effectively improve students’ writing becomes a serious problem demanding prompt solution.Feedback, as a dispensable part of writing teaching, seems particularly more important in improving students’ writing. In the field of English writing instruction, teacher written feedback has always been the most significant and common way of feedback to students’ writing, which is increasingly concerned in recent years. The current product writing approach or the popular process writing approach, either of which is paying much attention to the directive function of teacher written feedback in improving students’ writing abilities. In the past decades, although experts and scholars at home and abroad have done much research work on teacher written feedback from different perspectives and have obtained certain achievements, most of which mainly focused on students’ revision to their essays following their teachers’ written feedback rather than the effectiveness of teacher written feedback.Given this, this research tries to answer the following questions: 1) What are the features of teacher written feedback in EFL writing? 2) How do different types of teacher written feedback affect students’ writing ability? 3) After accepting teacher written feedback, what are students’ attitudes towards and preferences for different types of teacher written feedback?In this research, an English teacher and 50 students were selected as research subjects from Class 24 Grade One in Nanchong High School. Six essays of each student(50 students in total) were collected and marked by the participating teacher to get a profound insight into the effects of teacher written feedback on students’ writing and students’ attitudes to and preferences for different types of teacher written feedback(Error Feedback, Non-error Feedback). The whole research employed composition samples, questionnaire and interview to collect data. Data analysis was accomplished with the assistance of SPSS19.0 software.The results indicated:(1) The teacher not only paid abundant attention to surface aspects of language, but also attached great importance to deep-level aspects when giving feedback, showing preference for providing more explicit feedback in giving error feedback and comments on text ideas in giving non-error feedback, which was supported by and popular among her students.(2) The teacher written feedback including error feedback and non-error feedback did have favorable effectson improving students’ English writing.(3) Most of the students had positive attitudes towards teacher written feedback, preferring to be given more direct error feedback as well as specific and pointed teacher commentary. The study also sheds some lights on how to provide more effective teacher written feedback to students’ English writing; Finally, deficiencies of this research are presented and some suggestions for future research are also made.