The Effects Of Error Correction Feedback And Model Essays Feedback On Senior High Schools Students’ English Writing

The Senior English Curriculum Standard puts forward specific requirements for the goals of writing skills.It is clear that high school students should be able to write simple letters in the proper format,and learn to describe simple characters or events and express their own opinions.However,English writing is a complex and multilingual output,and also a weak link in the process of foreign language teaching in China.Based on the Output Hypothesis,Noticing Hypothesis and Process Writing Approach,this study investigates the effects of teacher’s error correction feedback and model essays feedback on senior high schools students’ English writing by means of qualitative and quantitative analysis.The difference from previous studies is that teachers not only grade but also evaluate students’ writing texts from three aspects: fluency,accuracy and complexity.More objective and more complete measurement was used to observe the effect of feedback.The experiment lasted for one semester,and the procedure was carried out in a five-step process: pre-test,experiment,immediate post-test,delayed post-test and interview.The subjects are 76 first-grade senior students from two classes of Yongji No.3 Middle School.Among them,38 students from Class 253 were regarded as experimental class(EC),while the other 38 students were from Class 252 and regarded as control class(CC).One experienced teacher was involved in the experiment.In the study,the two classes were assigned to different feedback conditions.In EC(n=38),they received the model texts and revised the original compositions by themselves while in CC(n=38),the teacher provided the direct feedback on students’ target language errors in their writing.The two classes of students were all asked to write the same composition the next day.Finally,the effect of the experiment on the students’ English writing was investigated by analyzing the data from pre-test and post-test.The specific research questions are as follows:(1)What are the effects of teacher]s error correction feedback and model essays feedback on the fluency of senior high school students’ English writing?(2)What are the effects of teacher’s error correction feedback and model essays feedback on the accuracy of senior high school students’ English writing?(3)What are the effects of teacher’s error correction feedback and model essays feedback on the complexity of senior high school students’ English writing?The SPSS17.0 statistical software was used to analyze and process the collected data.The following conclusions were obtained by means of independent sample T-test.Through the analysis of post-test writing from fluency,accuracy,syntactic complexity and lexical diversity,we can draw the following results:(1)In the immediate post-test,the results show that the teacher’s error correction feedback plays a significant role in improving the accuracy of the students’ English writing.Through the analysis of interview results,we figure out that most of the students in the teacher’s error correction class mainly focus on the grammatical aspects which are closely related to accuracy,either in the comparison stage or in the rewriting stage.(2)In the immediate post-test,the model essays feedback has a great effect on improving both the fluency and syntactic complexity of the students’ writing.This is because the model provides a variety of feedback for learners,and the learners can make reference according to their own interests and needs.Besides,it can well balance the meaning and form.(3)In the immediate post-test,the results of the experiment show that the effect of these two feedback methods is different;especially the latter is more advantageous than the former.Overall,in terms of writing performance,the students’ composition scores in the EC were higher than those of the CC.(4)In the delayed post-test,the results have shown that these two kinds of feedback would result in slight different effects on students’ writing.This may be related to the design of the experiment and the English level of the subjects.Therefore,we can get the following suggestions from the above findings: this study proved that these two kinds of feedback has their own advantages.English teachers can choose effective feedback methods according to different students’ situation and different teaching requirements,so that they can play a definite target and get twice the result with half the effort.