A Study Of The Effects Of Teachers’ Written Feedback On Senior High School Students’ Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing

As an essential part of English writing instruction,teachers’ written feedback facilitates the interaction between teachers and students by way of meaning negotiation.Teachers’ feedback involves many aspects,including language use,text structure,technical details,etc.,among which textual cohesion is an important one.However,teachers fail to pay enough attention to written feedback in the practice of English writing instruction and students’ awareness of text cohesion is generally weak.Also,few studies have been conducted to investigate the possible influence of teachers’ written feedback on students’ acquisition of cohesion.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore this issue through an experimental study.This study intends to focus on the following two research questions on the theoretical basis of Cohesion Theory,Noticing Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis:1)What effects does teachers’ written feedback have on students’ use of grammatical cohesive devices?2)What effects does teachers’ written feedback have on students’ use of lexical cohesive devices?To answer the two research questions,a sixteen-week experimental study has been carried out,and the research subjects are 117 students from two intact classes in Grade Two of a senior high school in Yueyang.Writing tests,students’ writing texts and questionnaire are all used to collect experiment data.During the process of the experiment,the experimental class receives teachers’ written feedback on cohesion and other aspects while the control class only receives feedback on grammar,spelling and so on.After the experiment,the collected data are systematically analyzed,and the results are drawn as follows: 1)Under the influence of teachers’ written feedback,the quantity of grammatical cohesive devices in students’ English writing has increased significantly and the categories are of great variety.To be specific,“reference” is more frequently used than “conjunction” while “substitution and ellipsis” are seldom used.Besides,the range of grammatical cohesive devices and its sub-categories slightly expands in students’ writing texts.2)Students tend to use more lexical cohesive devices in English writing.In terms of category,students’ use of “repetition” accounts for the largest proportion,“synonym” is the second while “antonym” and “hyponym” are relatively small.But the range of sub-categories expands and the use of lexical devices is more flexible and diverse in students’ writing texts.The results show that teachers’ written feedback has a positive influence on students’ use of cohesive devices,thus it is feasible to apply teachers’ written feedback based on Cohesion Theory into English writing,which to some extent can serve as guidance for English writing instruction in senior high school.