Effects Of Different Forms Of Written Corrective Feedback On Grammatical Accuracy In English Writing For Chinese College Students Of Different Grammatical Sensitivity

In line with listening,speaking and reading,English writing may be the most important skills for English learners.Written corrective feedback is the main form of teachers’ correction of students’ writing.Over the long period of time,written corrective feedback has always been a controversial topic.Although some scholars(e.g,Truscott,1996)pointed out that written corrective feedback had no effect on improving students’ grammatical accuracy in second language writing,a large number of researchers(e.g: Ferris,1995,1999;Sheen,2007,Ellis et al.,2008)were positive about the role of written corrective feedback.Over the past two decades,researches related to this topic mainly focus on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback and the comparison of different types of written corrective feedback.However,few consideration is taken into students’ individual factor and individual difference.Researchers rarely examine the influence of individual factor and individual difference on the effect of written corrective feedback.Grammatical sensitivity is one kind of learners’ language aptitude,which refers to the cognitive ability to identify grammatical functions of words and different syntactic patterns in sentence structure.Learners’ grammatical sensitivity influences their grammar learning.When learners study a grammatical structure,learners’ grammatical sensitivity would influence the effect of written corrective feedback on their grammatical accuracy gains in writing(Stefanou & Révész,2015).The present study takes students’ grammatical sensitivity into consideration and tries to explore the effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on grammatical accuracy of past hypothetical conditionals in English writing for students of different grammatical sensitivity.It mainly discusses whether there is a significant difference between these two feedback types for students of different grammatical sensitivity and what their exact differences are.Research subjects are sixty-two non-English major sophomores in two parallel classes from Sichuan International Studies University.Each class has thirty-one students and their English proficiency are almost at the same level.Students in one of the class all received focused written corrective feedback,only the grammatical errors of target structures were corrected,while another class received unfocused written corrective feedback,all the grammatical errors including target structures were corrected.According to the pre-test scores and grammatical sensitivity tests,students in each class were divided into high grammatical sensitivity groups,middle grammatical sensitivity groups and low grammatical sensitivity groups.The whole experiment last nine weeks,which consists of a pre-test,three treatments,a post-test and a questionnaire.Students were required to finish four compositions consisting of target structures during the experiment.The experiment results are analyzed by SPSS 16.0 software and it comes to the following conclusions:(1)After receiving focused and unfocused written corrective feedback,students of different grammatical sensitivity all improve their grammatical accuracy in English writing.However,there is a significant difference between the effects of these two written corrective feedback forms for students of different grammatical sensitivity.(2)To be exact,the effect of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback is almost the same for students of high grammatical sensitivity;as for students of middle grammatical sensitivity,the effect of unfocused corrective feedback is much better;as for students of low grammatical sensitivity,focused feedback is more preferable as the effect of focused corrective feedback is more significant.At last,this study provides some implications for English teaching: teachers cannot overlook learners’ grammatical sensitivity differences in the course of correcting students’ English writing.And teachers should select the proper feedback type based on students’ grammatical sensitivity,which can deepen students’ notice and understanding of second language knowledge.