2。 Literature Review

Teacher feedback has existed for a long time since teaching has been existed。 It appears through various forms, such as written form, oral form and body languages。 But it comes into researchers’ sight since process approach has been introduced into our country’s English Writing Course in 1970s。 As an important procedure in process approach, abundant researches and analysis have been done by lots of scholars from both home and abroad。

 Some researches such as Chaudron (1984) focus on whether the mistakes of students should be collected to decide when and how to correct。 For this problem, Hedge (2002) suggests that teachers should leave correction until the end of activities。 Ellis also claims that many teachers prefer to frequent immediate feedback without disrupting the overall communicative flow of lesson。 

Some researches are conducted on what kinds of teacher feedback are more efficient。 Different researchers have different ideas。 Ur (1996) holds that both positive and negative feedback should be available to students as honestly as possible。 Long (1996) highlights the importance of negative feedback, which can arouse students’ awareness。 Contrast to their points of view, Tsui (2000) favors positive feedback。 It is claimed that constant negative feedback is likely to create a sense of failure and frustration among students and will inhibit students’ contribution。 

Grammar feedback and content feedback, which one is more important is a hot topic between researchers, but the results came out are still controversial。 Semke (1984) concluded the group who received content feedback only made slight progress in their writing, whereas slight differences can be noticed between other groups。 Similar to Semke’s method, Kepner (1991) designed a study and got a conclusion that the group who only received grammar feedback had grammatical errors 15% lower than the other group, while the group who received content feedback performed better in sentence construction。 Tim Ashwell (2000) came with a result that all the experimental groups made progress in grammar, yet the control group who received no feedback at all made greater progress in content than the three experimental groups。 Through there already exists many researches about this, the results are still controversial。

Today in China, a lot of researchers began to study teacher feedback and have got some progress in recent years。 Such as the researches on teacher feedback from the perspectives of error analysis were done by Dai weidong and Shu Dingfang; the problems of teacher feedback (Zhao 17)。 In the study of Zhao, it claims that Chinese teachers prefer to correct the errors in pronunciation, grammar, and usage of words in student-centered English classroom, which often interrupt the classroom conversation。 In conclusion, teacher feedback has a positive effect on promoting students’ writing competence。

3。 An Overview of Teacher Feedback

3。1 A brief introduction to process approach in English Writing Course

In China, the teaching of writing in middle school classroom is always regarded as one of the most difficult tasks。 How to teach writing and how to comment on or mark students’ writing are frequently discussed topics among teachers。 The process approach to writing is not a brand new approach since it was first put forward in 1970s which based on the communicative theory。 It is also called a multiple-drafts process, consisting of pre-writing, writing, drafting and rewriting。

The features of writing under process approach is as follows(Brown 320-321):

Focus on the process of writing that leads to the final written product; 

Help student writers to understand their own composing process; 

Help them to build repertoires of strategies for pre-writing, drafting, and rewriting; 

Give students time to write and rewrite; 文献综述