A Study On Middle School Students' Response To The Teacher's Written Feedback In English Compositions

As an integral part of writing teaching,the written feedback has attracted the attention of many researchers.Feedback is a bridge between teachers and students,which can arouse students' writing interests and affect the writing quality.In order to improve the effectiveness of written feedback,many researchers conduct the research of teacher written feedback from different aspects,mainly focusing on the effectiveness of corrective feedback.But the reasons for providing written feedback are not enough.Exploring students' response to the written feedback is lacking,among which most of the research is conducted in the context of the ESL.High school students and college students are chosen in other researches.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate middle school students' response to the teache's written feedback.The research aims at providing suggestions for the effectiveness of written feedback in junior middle school students' English writing.This study focuses on a middle school English teacher,conducting one year's longitudinal study to know about the distribution of types of the teacher's written feedback in the EFL context and further explores the reasons for the teacher's written feedback.The participants in this study include an English teacher in a middle school in Wuhan and 102 students in her class.The teacher arranges for all students to complete four English compositions on different topics within one academic year and evaluates in time and provides timely written feedback.At the end of the school year,the teacher needs to complete the interview designed by the researcher to explore the reasons for her written feedback.Students in her class need to complete the questionnaire designed by the researcher,which focuses on the students' response to the teacher's written feedback.This study aims to accomplish the following two questions:(1)What is the distribution of types of the teacher's written feedback?(2)What is the students' response to the teacher's written feedback?The research of results shows that:Firstly,the participating teacher pays attention to both the language form and the content in evaluating compositions.In corrective feedbacks,the diversity of feedback types of the teacher is not obvious.The teacher tends to use direct corrective feedbacks.In non-corrective feedbacks,the teacher pays attention to the use of commentary.And in various commentaries,comments on ideas take in the first place.Secondly,most students can realize the importance of the teacher's written feedback and take it seriously.They expect to get written feedback about grammar and vocabulary.This study has certain importance to explore how teachers can provide effective written feedback of English writing of middle school students.