Effects Of Different Written Corrective Feedback On Junior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Subject-Verb Agreement

The accurate use of grammatical structure has always been one of the most important and basic criteria to evaluate the accuracy of students’ writing.Written Corrective feedback(WCF)has been widely used when Chinese English teachers correct students’ compositions.However,the debate concerning the effect of WCF has been ongoing since Truscott(1996)confirmed the ineffectiveness of WCF.Teachers may feel confused about whether different types of WCF have different effects,and besides the current situation of students’grammatical accuracy in junior high schools is far from satisfactory.Although there are lots of researches about WCF abroad,the relevant studies are still scarce in China.Based on Input Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Noticing Hypothesis,this study attempts to tackle the following three questions:1.What are the different effects of direct WCF and MF on junior high school students’ acquisition of subject-verb agreement?2.What is the different effect of MF on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement between students of different English proficiencies?3.What is the different effect of direct WCF on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement between students of different English proficiencies?Both quantitative study and qualitative study were adopted in this research.With respect to the quantitative research,an experiment,lasting for nine weeks,was conducted in three parallel classes of grade 9 in a public school in Jiangsu Province.A pre-test was used to decide which classes acted as the experimental classes(ECs)or which class acted as control class(CC).During the experiment,direct WCF and MF was adopted in two ECs respectively,while there was no WCF in CC.After the experiment,a post-test was held.The collected data was analyzed by SPSS 21.0.With regard to the qualitative study,a semi-structured interview was conducted among 12 students from the two ECs and their feedbacks were collected and analyzed to probe into students’ attitudes toward direct WCF and MF.The major findings were as following:(1)Both direct WCF and MF were significantly effective in facilitating junior high school students’ acquisition of subject-verb agreement,however,there was no obvious difference between direct WCF and MF.(2)MF exerted no significant difference in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement between high-and low-achievers,even though low-achievers progressed slightly better than high-achievers.(3)Direct WCF exerted a significant difference in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement between high-and low-achievers,with high-achievers performing much better than low-achievers.Pedagogical implications are listed as follows:(1)Teachers should use WCF on the improvement of grammatical accuracy for students.(2)Teachers should take into account students’ linguistic proficiency when providing feedback.Some limitations and suggestions are put forward:(1)the size of participants in this study was relatively small,so the findings of this research might not be representative.(2)this study only focused on subject-verb agreement.Future studies should examine the effect of different types of WCF on other linguistic structures.(3)the study investigated different effectiveness of both MF and direct WCF on the students’ acquisition of subject-verb agreement between high-and low-achievers.Future researches may take other factors into consideration,such as learning styles,educational background,motivation and attitudes etc.