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Chapter I Introduction

1.1 Background
Writing plays an indispensable role among the four basic skills through English learning.Cultivating writing ability has become a vital objective in English teaching because writingtraining can help learners improve their critical thinking ability. Researchers and teachers areworking hard to find the effective methods.In 1970s, Process Writing Approach was recommended into language teachingfiled.Feedback, as an essential element of the Process Writing Approach, has become anindispensable part of writing teaching. It arouses great interests among domestic and foreignresearchers.Some researchers consider feedback as an integral part and make all-round assessment.As Keh (1990) claims that feedback is an essential component of the Process Writing Approach.And she defines feedback as an input from a reader to a writer whose role is to provideinformation to the writer for revision. Ashwell (2000) even emphasizes that the significance offeedback as a“central and critical contribution to the evolution of a piece of writing”.Corrective feedback (CF) is probably the most diffusely used form in second language (L2)teaching. The earliest studies of CF is in the 1970s which presented pure descriptive results ofteachers’ error feedback in various classroom settings (Chaudron, 1988). One of the commonfindings of these early studies was the frequent occurrence of teacher corrections, irrespective ofpedagogical focuses or classroom settings, and that error treatment is desired by most L2 learners(Cathcart & Olsen,1976;Chaudron, 1988; Leki, 1991). These studies also reveal that teachers’provision of corrective feedback is often arbitrary, idiosyncratic, ambiguous and unsystematic,which leads to the question that whether error correction in the classroom is valuable(Han,2002).
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1.2 Purpose and significance of the thesis
Due to the different research parameters in design, although many opinions on theeffectiveness and types of written corrective feedback have been put forward in the academiccircles with a series of empirical researches being done, the findings of many studies are still farfrom conclusive, which makes it unrealistic to put the findings of corrective feedback into ChineseEnglish writing teaching practice. Compared with foreign studies in this filed, it is relativelyinsufficient in China. Thus, studying on the question of which type of WCF will help students toperfect their writing grammatical competence seems fairly compelling.First, whether teachers provide L2 learners with feedback in English writings or not havearoused considerable arguments. The relevant findings on the effect of corrective feedback havebeen reported that it is understood that some teachers go over the contents and structures withoutcorrecting any language errors. Some teachers even let students imitate models and they assertthat students do not need teacher’s feedback because of their strong imitation ability. What’smore, other teachers assert WCF is just mental encouragement.From the perspective of expert’s teaching experience at home, although types of correctionare different, experts share a lot in common. Writing Assessment Form, which is used byProfessor Wu(2010) from Beijing Foreign Studies University was classified as contents, structuresand language errors in detail in her research. She proved that students can reduce low-levelmistakes gradually after a semester