An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Teacher Feedback On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Competence

In the 1970 s,feedback was introduced into writing teaching through the process approach,and teacher feedback has been regarded as an important way to evaluate students’ writing performance and cultivate students’ writing competence.According to the form of feedback,feedback can be divided into direct feedback and indirect feedback.However,there has not been consensus among researchers at home and abroad as to which one of the two is a better way to develop students’ writing competence.Based on the previous research,the present study attempts to provide an improved form of teacher feedback in contrast to the traditional teacher feedback which corrects students’ errors directly and gives a general mark for students’ writing.The improved feedback refers to indirect written feedback with codes and teacher conference,shortened as coded feedback with conference.Coded feedback is used to underline and code students’ errors while teacher conference,which is conducted between the teacher and students in groups focusing on prominent problems in students’ writings,is carried out after students have corrected their errors according to the coded feedback.The research design is divided into three parts: a teaching experiment using coded feedback with conference as a way of providing feedback on students’ writing,questionnaire survey and interview.The experiment lasted for 16 weeks,from September,2017 to January,2018.The subjects were from two parallel classes with 33 students in each,66 subjects in total,in a senior high school in Heyuan City,Guangdong Province.One class was designated as the experimental group and the other the control group.Coded feedback with conference was carried out in the experimental group while traditional direct feedback was used in the control group.Pretests and posttests were conducted respectively before and after the experiment.Quantitative data were collected and analyzed by SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Science)22.0,along with a qualitative analysis of a follow-up interview.The results showed that:1.Students in the experimental class made significant progress,whether from the holistic scoring or from the analytic scoring,which indicated that coded feedback with conference was effective in improving students’ writing competence.2.According to the questionnaire survey and the interview,among the experimental group,15.2% preferred direct feedback while 84.8% preferred indirect feedback,with coded feedback by itself the favorite of 18.2%,conference by itself the favorite of 30.3% and coded feedback in combination with conference the favorite of36.3%.93.9% believed that coded feedback with conference was helpful to improve their writing ability;87.9% were satisfied with this form of feedback;in addition91%,97%,100%,78.8% and 97% respectively agreed that coded feedback with conference was useful to help them develop the writing content,structure,grammar,vocabulary and mechanics(e.g.punctuation,spelling).3.Coded feedback with conference could enhance the development of students’ autonomous writing strategies.Based on the empirical study,the present thesis puts forward three suggestions on teacher feedback in English writing teaching and learning.First,arouse students’ attention to errors in their writings through codes.Second,apply teacher conference to give face-to-face feedback on students’ writings.Third,help students develop autonomous writing strategies.