1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study

Although many researches have been conducted by scholars at home and abroad in recent years, the effectiveness and influences of teachers’ feedback on students’ writing are not decided. Meanwhile, the empirical researches are mostly conducted in foreign countries or in colleges, studies on feedback in high school are still scarcely seen in China. Besides, there is still no detailed description or no systematic method of how to give effective writing feedback. So many teachers are still confused that few feedback strategies at hand could be adopted in students’ writing. 

Therefore, this thesis is trying to study teachers’ feedback in high school English writing teaching. Firstly, it aims to find out different types of teachers’ writing feedback on high school students’ English writing. Secondly, it tries to seek the effects of teachers’ feedback on high school English writing. Thirdly, it wants to explore students’ opinions toward teachers’ feedback.

It is hoped that the research results can help teachers use proper feedback to provide students with emotional support, stimulate students’ motivation and so on to improve writing proficiency. It is also hoped that the research result can help teachers to seek more effective and appropriate feedback form to promote students’ writing skills in high school, which is of great practical significance.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Definition and classification of feedback

Feedback has been defined in different ways. The word “feedback” originally refers to the information that sent back to an organism which has acted on its environment in biology. 

In the context of human performance, Ramaprasad (1983: 28) regards feedback as “information about the gap between the actual level and the reference (or desired) level of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap in some way”. He specifically requires that the information about the gap must be used to alter the gap for feedback to exist.

In education, feedback is an important concept of cybernetics. It refers to the process in the control system that sending back the output information to the inputs and then adding impact on the way of output again. In the teaching environment, the feedback means “returning information for a certain study task to improve and promote students’ learning.” (Ur, 1998: 242). Thus in general, feedback is any information produced in response to a learners’ situation. Feedback can help learners to identify those errors and be aware of the wrong performance. 

    Feedback plays a useful role in SLA, Lalande (1982: 140) defines feedback as “any procedure used to inform a learner where an instructional response is right or wrong.” In China, Zhang and Dai (2001) view feedback as a consisting complexion of two identifiable components: evaluation and correction. Thus providing teachers’ feedback is necessary. Little or no feedback will lead to a limitation of improvement in SLA writing.

In English writing teaching, Keh (1990: 294) emphasizes that feedback is a fundamental element of process writing approach and it can be defined as “input from a reader to a writer with the effect of providing information to the writer for revision.” The writer learns where he or she had misled or confused the learner by supplying limited message, illogical organization, lack of ideas development, or inappropriate word-choice or tense through feedback. Effective feedback not only reflects the subjectivity of students, but also has a positive impact on students’ knowledge of the writing, cognition and emotion to create a good teacher-student interaction context. So this is the most common and comprehensive definition of feedback in writing. The current research adopts Keh’s definition of feedback as the working definition.