A Study Of The Impacts Of Teachers’ Written Corrective Feedback On The Linguistic Accuracy Of Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is one of the major channels to convey information in daily life.It holds a vital position in the National Matriculation English Test(NMET).For English learners in senior high school,there are profound difficulties improving linguistic accuracy of English writing.As an English teacher,it is urgent to explore efficient ways to assist senior students improve their linguistic accuracy of English writing.Since the 1980s,it has always been a controversial issue whether or not teachers’ corrective feedback can indeed improve the linguistic accuracy of English writing.On the one hand,a majority of studies have shown that written corrective feedback(WCF)from teachers can assist students to correct their linguistic errors and facilitate the improvement of linguistic accuracy.On the other hand,substantial studies about the issue have reported that as far as the improvement of students’ linguistic accuracy is concerned,WCF from teachers is ineffective,even harmful to students.In order to further study the issue and provide more reliable evidence for English writing instruction,the study endeavors to explore the following three questions:Question 1: Is teachers’ written corrective feedback(WCF)effective in helping senior high school students improve linguistic accuracy when redrafting compositions with the same topics?Question 2: Do students receiving written corrective feedback(WCF)produce lower error rates than those receiving no written corrective feedback(WCF)in producing new compositions?Question 3: What type of WCF(direct CF with correction provided from the teachers and indirect CF with specific linguistic errors underlined but no correction from the author)is more effective in contributing to the improvement of linguistic accuracy of senior high school students writing?To examine three questions above effectively,the author made an investigation and presented the research results which were based on a 4-month study of WCF on two targeted linguistic errors(errors in nouns and subject-predicate agreement)The research results have indicated that the use of WCF exerts a significantly positive impact on the improvement of linguistic accuracy of senior high school students’ English writing.Based on error rates,both groups(group1 and group2)receiving WCF on the improvement of linguistic accuracy are superior to the control group receiving no corrective feedback in redrafting compositions with the same topics.Meanwhile,research results have also proved that students receiving WCF produce lower error rates than those without WCF provided with in producing new compositions.Additionally,it was found that there is a significant difference between direct CF group and indirect CF group in the improvement of writing accuracy when producing new compositions.Direct feedback does help the students improve the linguistic accuracy of writing in redrafting compositions with the same topics,but it is less facilitative of the improvement of writing accuracy than indirect CF when they produce new compositions.So,indirect corrective feedback takes more advantages over direct corrective feedback in assisting students to improve linguistic accuracy of writing in long-term language acquisition.