Effects Of Direct And Indirect Feedback On Junior High School Students’ Grammar Accuracy In English Writing

English writing plays an important role in English teaching.Writing reflects students’ overall language ability and developing students’ English writing skills is one of the main tasks of current English teaching.Feedback is a central component of the second language writing.Meanwhile feedback has been the focus in second language acquisition research.There are numerous studies have proven that feedback improves grammatical accuracy and further enhances students’ writing skills.Sometimes Junior high school students are unable to realize the errors in their writing and need teachers to provide feedback at this time.Most of the researches on teacher feedback focus on its influence on writing accuracy,but few explore the relationship between different types of feedback and different types of errors.Based on Noticing Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Zone of Proximal Development as the theoretical foundations,this study distinguishes two types of errors,treatable and untreatable.Subject-verb agreement and article(treatable errors),and preposition(untreatable errors)are selected as target language observations.This study intends to answer the following three questions:1.How does direct and indirect feedback affect the accuracy of the use of the language targets(subject-verb agreement,article and preposition)in junior high school students’ English writing?2.What is the correlation between the two types of feedback(direct feedback,indirect feedback)and different types of errors(treatable errors,untreatable errors)?3.What are students’ attitudes towards direct and indirect feedback?This study lasts 16 weeks and the students from two natural classes in a junior high school in Jinhua are selected as subjects.Experimental class A receive direct feedback(teacher corrects the target structure in students’ compositions directly);indirect feedback for experimental class B(teacher underlines the errors in students’ compositions).SPSS 23.0 are used to analyze and discuss the experimental data.The findings of the study are as follows:1.Direct and indirect feedbacks improve the accuracy of the language targets,with students who receive direct feedback showing a smaller increase in preposition(untreatable error)accuracy.But indirect feedback has less influence on improving article(treatable error)accuracy.2.Direct feedback has a more positive effect on the accuracy of the treatable errors(subject-verb agreement,article),while indirect feedback is more applicable to untreatable errors(preposition).The reason for this may be that different error types have different linguistic characteristics.3.The results of the questionnaires and interviews shows that students in both classes have positive attitudes towards teacher feedback.They expect teacher to give feedback and be able to revise their compositions based on feedback.However,in the class that receive indirect feedback,some students with low ability report that the indirect feedback causes distress to their revisions.This study suggests that teacher feedback is important for teaching English writing in junior high school.