The Effects Of Frequency And Teacher Written Feedback On English Writing Ability Of Middle School Students

As a form of expressing thoughts and feelings,writing grows out of social interaction.In fact,students are weak in writing in spite of spending much time and energy.The problem is that the actual second language writing is not effective.There is a firm foundation that has been laid for connectionism,behaviorism,cognitive theory and the theory of task-repetition.The predecessors did several studies on frequency effects.In those studies,second language listening,reading and speaking accounted for a large proportion.Besides,the subjects were mainly college and senior high school students.The results showed that frequency played a momentous role in improving second language acquisition.In this paper,frequency is paid emphasis on the times of contacting and practicing language materials.This study aims to explore how frequency with the same writing task and teacher written feedback affects English writing in junior middle school.Frequency was the variable within groups,teacher written feedback was the variable between groups and writing quality was the dependent variable.The writing quality was converted to writing scores.Sixty grade students were divided into three groups randomly,namely the frequency group with teacher written feedback,the frequency group without feedback and the control group without frequency or feedback.They wrote the compositions four times in four serial weeks.The four compositions were rooted in recent senior high school entrance examination of Jiangxi Province.The subjects in the two experimental groups wrote a composition for Topic 1 three times and for Topic 4 in the fourth writing.The control group of subjects wrote a composition four times for Topic 1,2,3 and 4 in sequence.After all the materials were collected,two experienced teachers evaluated the compositions by unified score system.A repeated measure ANOVA,Paired-Samples T Test and Independent-Samples T Test with SPSS 18 were used to find the relation among the variables.The results of the qualitative and quantitative analysis of students' compositions indicate as follows:(a)The writing quality was improved to a degree with the frequency increasing,but the positive effects got weaker.The subjects made the most modifications in the aspects of grammar and vocabulary.(b)Teacher written feedback conduced to the most progress of writing in regard to advanced expression.Some progress was also made in the grammar and vocabulary.(c)The subjects in the frequency group with teacher written feedback advanced much in the grammar,vocabulary and high-lever presenation,whereas little or no improvement was found in the content and structure.(d)The grades in the post-test were higher than those in the pre-test,and the change was mainly embodied in the grammar,vocabulary and advanced expression.Based on the results of data analysis,the conclusions this study has drawn are as below.Firstly,both frequency and teacher written feedback make a great contribution to improving the second language writing on the whole.There is significant progress in the grammar,but there is almost no improvement in the content and structure.Secondly,teacher written feedback has duplicate effects for frequency and the mutual effects are the largest.Therefore,this study has some theoretical and pedagogical significance.It could enrich the theories of frequency effects,which makes us have a better knowledge of frequency effects.Realistically,the training mode,which is the combination of frequency and teacher written feedback,can be applied into the process of second language writing instruction.