An Action Research On The Activity-Theory-based Teacher Written Corrective Feedback Model To Senior Students' Writing

Teacher written corrective feedback is a process that the teacher corresponds to students' compositions.Moreover,it is influenced by a series of factors such as the teacher,students,the feedback content and is mediated by tools and signs and it serves as a medium which can raise students' awareness on how language works.Activity Theory considers the activity system as the unit of analysis and the activity system is a collective system.Moreover,Engestrom(1987)put forward the activity system of Socialcultural Theory which includes six elements: the subject,object,community,the rule,tools and signs,division of labor.These elements interact with each other in the activity.Based on the activity theory and combined with the teaching experience,the author attempts to improve the teacher written CF in terms of students' writing proficiency,so as to enhance students' writing ability.Therefore,the author conducted a 3-month action research in Class 3,Grade 2 of a senior high school in Guangzhou,to solve the following questions: 1)As for direct and indirect CF,which one is more effective for low-level and high-level students of language proficiency? 2)Based on the Activity Theory,how should we construct the effective direct and indirect teacher written CF model?Before the action research,a pre-test was adopted to discern students' preliminary writing ability and the pre-questionnaire was used to explore students' attitude toward English writing and teacher written corrective feedback(TWCF).In the first-round action research,direct CF was provided in the second and third weeks,but in the next two weeks,indirect CF was given.Then the interview was held.In the interview,it was found that students with low-level language proficiency prefer direct CF while students with high-level language proficiency like indirect CF better.Moreover,when low-level students received the direct CF,some of them could not fully understand the nature of errors.On the other hand,students with high-level language proficiency who received feedback by locating errors were worried that they could not revise errors correctly.According to the results of the interview,in the second round of the action research,direct and indirect CF including meta-linguistic explanation with different tools and signs were adjusted to students' varying levels of language proficiency.Finally,pair samples t-tests of pre-test and the second test,pre-test and the post test,together with comparison on pre-questionnaire and post questionnaire,jointly found that there exists the correlation between students' language proficiency and teachers format written CF.Direct CF is better for low-level students while indirect CF is more effective for students who have deeper foundation in English.Based on these findings and the feedback model of EFL writing proposed by Yu Shulin(2013),the author constructs the effective direct and indirect CF model which seeks to represent the effective direct and indirect CF on different feedback objects considering students' varying language proficiency.