The Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On Chinese Efl Learners’acquisition Of English Collocations

The role of written corrective feedback(CF) in the process of acquiring a second language(L2) has been an issue of considerable controversies over past decades. This study thus endeavors to extend current work on written CF by investigating and comparing the effect of one traditional type of written CF—direct corrective feedback(DCF)—with an innovative type of written CF—feedback provided within context named situated feedback(SF) on collocation learning.A total of 73 intermediate Chinese EFL students from three natural parallel classes participated in this study and they were randomly assigned as three groups: a DCF group, a SF group, and a control group. All the three groups were required to fulfill a procedure of pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest. For the collection of quantitative data, the general effects of written CF on collocation learning as well as the comparative effectiveness between the two written CF options(i.e., DCF and SF) were measured by examining participants’ accurate use of 16 target collocations in a translation test and a multiple choice test. For the collection of qualitative data,two treatment groups were asked to complete a questionnaire by the end of the research. The analysis of the data involved two major steps. Step one concerned the statistical analysis with SPSS 17.0. By performing a series of two-way ANOVAs and Scheffe post hoc analyses, the efficacy of written CF on collocation learning was revealed and statistically differential gains among the three groups were also detected. Step two was the analysis of the questionnaire data. Participants’ responses to the questionnaire were examined carefully so that the different effects between the two types of written CF could be further uncovered.The major findings of the study are as follows. First, both treatment groups outperformed the control group in the posttests and delayed posttests, whichsuggested that the provision of written CF was helpful for the learning of English collocations. Second, the SF group obtained significantly more gains than the DCF group in both posttests, indicating that situational context could promote the facilitative role of written CF in language acquisition. Third, with respect to the response to the questionnaire, the majority of the SF group showed a liking for the context-embedded written CF whereas only less than half of the participants in the DCF group expressed their preferences to the context-reduced written CF, which manifested that written CF provided within situational context gained greater popularity among L2 learners.On the basis of the above findings, it is concluded that written CF, by indicating error places, arouses L2 learners’ conscious attention to the gap between their interlanguage and target language on one hand, and by providing the correct forms,enables L2 learners to bridge the gap on the other. Besides, the context-embedded written CF(i.e., SF), by engaging learners with different levels of cognitive system,enhances their comprehension and promotes their retention of the target structures,thus producing more conducive effects.