Effects Of Direct Corrective Feedback And Metalinguistic Explanation On Linguistic Accuracy Of Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Written corrective feedback(WCF)is divided by Ellis(2009)into six types,namely,direct corrective feedback(DCF),indirect corrective feedback,metalinguistic corrective feedback,focused and unfocused feedback,electronic feedback as well as reformulation.There are two forms under the category of metalinguistic corrective feedback.One is coded feedback,and the other is metalinguistic explanation(ME).The type of written corrective feedback is an important factor influencing linguistic accuracy of students’ English writing.In recent years,many scholars have compared the effects of direct corrective feedback and indirect corrective feedback.However,there are relatively few studies comparing the effects of direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation.It is even scarcer to probe into the effectiveness of written corrective feedback on different-level students’English writing.Based on such a research background,this study,taking learners’ different English levels into consideration,explores the different effects of direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on linguistic accuracy of senior high school students’ English writing.The following research questions are addressed in this study:1.What are the different effects of direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on linguistic accuracy of same-level students’ English writing?(1)What are the different effects of direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on linguistic accuracy of high-level students’ English writing?And why?(2)What are the different effects of direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on linguistic accuracy of low-level students’ English writing?And why?2.What are the different effects of direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on linguistic accuracy of different-level students’ English writing respectively?(1)What are the different effects of direct correction feedback on linguistic accuracy of high-level and low-level students’ English writing?And why?(2)What are the different effects of metalinguistic explanation on linguistic accuracy of high-level and low-level students’ English writing?And why?This study takes noticing hypothesis,comprehensible hypothesis and interaction hypothesis as the theoretical framework,adopting the mixed design of quantitative and qualitative approaches.The experiment in quantitative research lasted twelve weeks and there were six writing exercises.The subjects,90 students of Senior Two,are from two parallel classes in a public senior high school in Yangzhou.One class which was provided with direct corrective feedback was defined as DCF group,and the other class which received metalinguistic explanation was ME group.They all participated in the pre-test and post-test.The qualitative research took the form of interview.Eight students from DCF group and ME group(four students in each group)were selected as the interviewees.The major findings were as following:1.The results yielded from the tests indicated that direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation had different effects on linguistic accuracy of same-level students’ English writing.(1)Although both direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation had significant effects on improving linguistic accuracy of high-level students’ English writing,metalinguistic explanation was more effective than direct corrective feedback.The results of the interview showed the reasons.On the one hand,high-level students had good learning habits and their own learning strategies.They were capable of self-reflection and self-correction and good at learning from errors.On the other hand,high-level students had a relatively good storage of knowledge.Metalinguistic explanation motivated them to understand the grammatical items within the errors and remember them,helping them facilitate the internalization of the knowledge.(2)Direct corrective feedback was more effective than metalinguistic explanation for low-level students.To be more specific,direct corrective feedback had significant effects on improving linguistic accuracy of low-level students’ English writing,while metalinguistic explanation did not.The results of the interview showed the reasons.Direct corrective feedback could make students have a more intuitive and clear understanding of the errors in their English writing.Besides,low-level students did not have enough knowledge to understand the metalinguistic explanation.2.The results of the tests showed that direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation had different effects on linguistic accuracy of different-level students’ English writing respectively.(1)Although direct corrective feedback had significant effects on improving linguistic accuracy of both high-level and low-level students’ English writing,it was more effective for low-level students.The results of the interview showed the reasons.Direct corrective feedback could help the students to understand the errors explicitly and clearly and it required minimal cognitive processing,so it was probably superior especially for low-level students.For high-level students,there was little difference between providing correct forms or not,because they were able to correct the errors in most cases even though the errors were only marked without correction.(2)Metalinguistic explanation was more effective for high-level students than for low-level students.Concretely speaking,metalinguistic explanation had significant effects on improving linguistic accuracy of high-level students’ English writing,while it had no significant effects on low-level students.The results of the interview showed the reasons.High-level students had the ability to work on the metalinguistic explanation and finally internalize the knowledge.However,low-level students were not able to correct the errors due to the lack of storage of knowledge although detailed explanations were provided.In addition,low-level students were reluctant to spend enough time in understanding and learning from the metalinguistic explanation.In light of the findings,this study provides some pedagogical implications:1.Teachers should employ direct corrective feedback in combination with metalinguistic explanation in the teaching of English writing.2.Students’ English level should be taken into account in the process of providing written corrective feedback.(1)For high-level students,teachers had better provide more metalinguistic explanation,which can get the students involved in processing information and learning grammatical descriptions.(2)For low-level students,it is advisable to provide more direct corrective feedback to have the students focus their noticing on the errors and get them to know the correct expressions.For complex errors that are difficult to deal with,some explanations necessary should be provided.