Investigation And Research On The Status Quo Of Teacher Feedback In The Teaching Of English Writing In Junior High Schools

Writing is an essential skill for language learning,it is an important part of junior high school English teaching as well.Teachers’ feedback is significant to improve learners’ English writing skills.Previous studies about teachers’ feedback focus mostly on high school,vocational and university writing courses,but less on junior high school.18 English teachers and 480 junior middle school students in Zhengding County,Hebei Province,participated this study.The research adopted questionnaires,interviews and text analysis to study the following two questions.1.What is the situation of teachers’ feedback in junior middle school English writing teaching?2.What are the ways that teachers and students deal with the writing feedback?Through the research,the following two problems are found: First,The forms of the teachers’ feedback are quite rigid and mechanized.Teachers do not provide specific feedback for different students accordingly.Second,after writing feedback teachers fail to provide students with specific measures to tackle the problems in feedback.The interviews of teachers and students show that three major reasons resulted the above problems: first,the teachers’ team has not received systematic training on related feedback skills,the teaching skills are at a low level,besides,the teaching concept is not updated in time.Second,the teachers are not aware of the importance of the design of fellow-up tasks after feedback which leads to the missing of the chances for students to revise and improve writing.Third,the teacher-student communication is not timely and smooth,and teachers’ feedback does not match the student’s expectations,which makes the student fail to attach great importance to teacher feedback.Based on Vygotsky’s recent development zone and scaffold theory,output hypothesis theory,feedback and attention theory and interactive hypothesis,the author provides corresponding suggestions in three aspects: First,schools should attach great importance to teachers training,improving teachers’ conscious of feedback,and enabling teachers to take personalized and targeted feedback.Second,paying attention to the follow-up tasks after feedback,teachers should prompt students to carry out exercises accordingly.Third,teachers should be good at building a platform for equal communication with students and provide feedback that the students really need.The author hopes this research could be of reference to further research on teacher’s feedback in the future.The limitations of this research includes: first,the research samples are single.Second,the conditions are incomplete.Hopefully,these limitations could be improved in future research.