The Effects Of Teacher Written Corrective Feedback On English Writing Of Junior Middle School Students At Different Language Proficiency Levels

Among the four skills(reading,speaking,listening,writing),writing is the most difficult part in English learning,so EFL learners often find it harder to make progress in writing skill than in other skills.Providing teacher feedback is a crucial procedure in writing course,thus it is of vital importance to know the effects of teacher feedback.Though teacher feedback has been studied by a great number of researchers,research on the effects of different teacher feedback has scarcely explored at the level of junior middle school students.Besides,language proficiency has received little attention in previous studies.This study focuses on the effects of indirect feedback and metalinguistic feedback on English writing for junior middle school students.Specifically,it attempts to answer the following three questions:1)What are the characteristics of English teacher written feedback in junior middle school? And what are students’ attitudes towards written feedback?2)Will indirect feedback and metalinguistic feedback have an effect on English writing accuracy? If yes,which type of feedback has a greater impact?3)Will the two kinds of teacher written feedback have an effect on writing syntactic complexity? If yes,which type of feedback has a greater impact?The study was carried out among 30 eighth grade students,and lasted for four months,including four writing tasks.The instruments of the research included questionnaire,interviews,text analysis and writing tasks.Before the experiment,students were divided into three levels.Ten students were chosen from each level,and they were randomly divided into two sub-groups and received different kinds of feedback.At the same time,a questionnaire for students and a interview for three teachers were conducted and 150 marked compositions wereanalyzed.During the experiment,the author provided written feedback and recorded required data.At the end of the experiment,six students were interviewed to investigate the impact of teacher written feedback on students’ attitudes to feedback and writing as well as students’ expectation for teacher feedback.The results of the study show that most students want detailed teacher feedback to make progress in English writing.It is showed that indirect feedback has an effect on English writing accuracy and syntactic complexity for junior middle school students,but metalinguistic feedback has an impact on English writing accuracy only in the long term.Besides,there are no significant differences in the effects of indirect feedback and metalinguistic feedback on English writing accuracy for students.The study confirms the effectiveness of teacher written feedback and provides some pedagogical suggestions for practical teaching in English writing.