Teachers’ Written Feedback in Writing Chinese as a Foreign Language: A Study Based on the Thammasat University in Thailand
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Abstract
Although feedback has been a common research focus of L2 writing, very few studies have been conducted on it in the context of learning Chinese as a foreign language. This study explores the current situation of teacher feedback in Chinese as a foreign language writing classes. The study is based on written teacher feedback from 148 writing texts in a Chinese writing class at Thammasat University in Thailand, as well as teacher interviews and student questionnaire data for analysis. The results of the study showed that the quality of teacher feedback needs to be improved, and the feedback had problems in legibility, comprehensibility and consistency, which affected the effectiveness of the feedback. At the same time, there were large individual differences in feedback practices among teachers and inconsistencies between teachers’ and students’ feedback preferences. Students have a strong expectation of improving their language proficiency through feedback, but they are also more dependent on their teachers. Finally, this paper puts forward a series of suggestions for optimizing teacher feedback in response to the problems identified, hoping to give teachers of Chinese as a foreign language writing classes some inspiration and help them establish a more effective feedback mechanism for writing
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