A Study On The Effects Of Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback On High School Students’ English Writing Ability

Writing ability is an important topic for second language acquisition research,and writing teaching is an important part of English teaching in high school.Teacher feedback on students’ writing has a profound impact on the improvement of students’ English writing ability.Currently,the most widely adopted form of teacher feedback is one-off direct correction of student’s work,which does now allow any space for students’ self-correction and selfexploration.To solve this problem,many studies have been conducted on dynamic written corrective feedback—a form of feedback where teachers guide students to self-correct mistakes by marking errors with symbols,and after the students submit the corrected work,teachers will repeat the same process again.The effect of dynamic written corrective feedback on some specific language structures have been discussed in detailed,but there is still a lack of longitudinal studies on its effect on the improvement of students’ overall writing ability.This study took 70 grade two students from a senior high school in Shanghai as the research participants to explore the effects of dynamic written corrective feedback and traditional written corrective feedback on accuracy including error types,complexity and fluency through an experiment over a period of two months.The findings include: in terms of accuracy,both dynamic written corrective feedback and traditional written corrective feedback can effectively improve students’ writing accuracy.Compared with traditional written corrective feedback,dynamic written corrective feedback can significantly reduce students’ vocabulary errors and discourse errors,but it is not effective in reducing grammar errors though there may be such a potential in the long run.Dynamic written corrective feedback improves the writing accuracy of advanced students more significantly.In terms of complexity,dynamic written corrective feedback has a more significant effect on improving students’ lexical complexity,especially lexical richness,than traditional written corrective feedback;dynamic written corrective feedback has no obvious advantage in improving students’ syntactic complexity,but the syntactic complexity has been improved to a certain extent after multiple dynamic feedbacks.Dynamic written corrective feedback improves the writing complexity of lower-level students more significantly.In terms of fluency,neither dynamic written corrective feedback nor traditional written corrective feedback has significant effects in the short term,and there is no difference between students at different levels of language proficiency.Compared with traditional written corrective feedback,dynamic written corrective feedback can help improve the organization and readability of students’ writing.