A Study On The Situation And Influencing Factors Of Chinese High School Students’ Engagement With Written Corrective Feedback

Written corrective feedback is regarded as an effective practice to improve students’ writing,but students’ acceptance and utilization of it are related to their engagement.Therefore,it is necessary to study students’ engagement with written corrective feedback(WCF)and the influencing factors.At present,the research on students’ engagement with WCF is mainly concentrated in foreign countries,the research participants are usually college students,and the nascent sociocultural theory has not yet widely used to explore the influencing factors.In order to narrow the gap,this study applied the case study approach to investigate the engagement situation and influencing factors of three students with different writing abilities(high-proficiency,average,under-achieving)from a key high school in Hubei Province.The multi-dimensional perspective of Ellis(2010)was used to explore the situation of students’ engagement with WCF and the sociocultural theory(Mao & Lee,2021)was adopted to investigate the influencing factors.Data were collected from multiple resources including students’ writing,verbal reports,semi-structured interviews,and field notes.What’s more,a qualitative comparative approach was applied for data analysis.This research focused on the following two questions:(1)What are the differences and similarities between Chinese high school English learners’ engagement with written corrective feedback in the affective,behavioral and cognitive perspectives?(2)What are the factors influencing Chinese high school students’ engagement with written corrective feedback?The results were as follows:1.Similarities were manifested within four major ways which were the appreciation for teacher effort,positive attitudinal responses to WCF,successful noticing the WCF and active revision operations,while divergences were presented in emotional responses to WCF,understanding WCF,making cognitive operations,and employing revision and learning strategies.2.This study identified the influence of individual factors(students’ beliefs about linguistic accuracy and writing ability)and environmental factors(instructional focus in English class,peer relationship,types of writing tasks and evaluation criteria,school environment)from a sociocultural perspective.Among them,the pursuit of linguistic accuracy and grammar-focused teaching instruction helped students engage deeply in corrective written feedback,while the school environment in which English was not valued played a role in hindering it.The influence of students’ writing ability,types of writing tasks and evaluation criteria,and peer relationship depended on the specific situation.Based on the research findings,this study proposed the implications that high school students should consciously improve their own cognitive engagement,while maintaining high affective and behavioral engagement in order to make full use of teacher WCF.In addition,English teachers should provide necessary support according to the needs of students.In this way,students could become more cognitively,behaviorally,and affectively engaged and utilize WCF to improve their writing more effectively.