Teacher feedback is an essential part which can not be overlooked in English writing teaching. Whether teacher feedback is effective and which type of feedback is more effective in improving learners' writing proficiency have attracted more and more researchers' attention. Direct feedback is the feedback that teachers correct students' errors directly under the form or the right using habit of target language. Indirect feedback is the feedback that teachers only mark out or point out students' errors but not correct errors. This study explores the effects of two different kinds of feedback (direct feedback and indirect feedback) on the acquisition of English simple past tense in high school students' writing. And it attempts to answer the following three questions: 1) Do teachers' direct and indirect feedback in English writing influence senior high school students' acquisition of simple past tense? 2) If so, which kind of feedback (direct or indirect feedback) has the greater influence on improving students' acquisition of simple past tense in English writing? 3) What perceptions do students have towards teachers' direct and indirect feedback in English writing?The result showed that the two kinds of feedback have an influence on the acquisition of the target structure, however, there is no significant difference between direct and indirect feedback group, which states that indirect feedback class was not better than direct feedback class.Keywords: direct feedback, indirect feedback, English writing in high school, English simple past tense

The present study examines differences in syntactic complexity in English writing among writers at different levels and explores the relationship between syntactic complexity and writings with different genres. 20 students in grade three of a senior high school that were randomly selected from two brands of test scores were grouped into high and low proficiency groups. The 40 writings from the 20 students were examined. Writings were evaluated by L2SCA (L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer) gauging syntactic complexity at global, clausal and phrasal level. After obtaining the data, the complexity values were entered into SPSS 21.0 to do analysis. Results reveal that the difference of the two genres reaches a significant level in terms of C/T (clauses per T-unit) and CN/C (complex nominals per clause); there is no significant relationship between syntactic complexity and L2 proficiency levels and no significant interactive effect is found between the genre factor and proficiency factor. The results can yield implications for ESL writing pedagogy.