Effects Of Direct Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On Senior High Students’ Accuracy Of Subject-Verb Agreement

Written corrective feedback has been a disputable issue in the field of second language writing instruction.Some researchers believe that written corrective feedback is very effective,however,some researchers hold the opposite view.Moreover,the effectiveness of these two feedback types(direct focused and unfocused written corrective feedback)has been doubted by some scholars and researchers.Therefore,this study tries to conduct an empirical study of written corrective feedback to explore the efficacy of written corrective feedback and the impact of direct focused and unfocused written corrective feedback.The study is conducted in Zhouqu Senior High School,Lanzhou city,Gansu province.The participants are from Grade One and the study ties to explore two research questions as follows,(1)Does WCF in the form of direct focused and unfocused feedback have an effect on senior high school students’ accuracy of subject-verb agreement in English writing?(2)What are the effects of direct focused WCF and unfocused WCF on enhancing students’ accuracy of subject-verb agreement in English writing and which one is more effective?The experiment lasts 10 weeks in a senior high school.The experiment is composed of a pretest,six treatments and two post-tests.90 students from the three parallel classes are chosen as research subjects who are considered as the focused WCF group(n=30)and the unfocused WCF group(n=30)and the control group(n=30).Among these three groups,the teacher corrects the errors of the subject-verb agreement and gives its right form for students in the focused group.While in the unfocused group,the teacher corrects all the grammatical errors,including subject-verb agreement for students.The control group does not receive written corrective feedback,but only receives some comments on the content of their English writing without any information about language accuracy.In addition,in the present study,the three writing tests’ scores of students are counted and analyzed by SPSS20.0 which includes Descriptive statistics,One-way ANOVA analysis,Paired-samples T test and Multiple Comparison.The study shows that the two types of written corrective feedback both have positive effects on the accuracy of the target structure(subject-verb agreement)in English writing whether in the immediate posttest or the delayed post-test,while there is no significant improvement in the control group.Meanwhile,there is also statistically significant difference between the focused group and the unfocused group,but compared with the latter,the former is more effective in enhancing students’ accurate use of the subject-verb agreement in English writing.