Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback And Grammatical Sensitivity On Junior High School Students’ Learning Of The Present Perfect Tense

The impact of written corrective feedback（WCF）on foreign language learning has been a hot topic of research in foreign language teaching.Most of the previous studies focused on the effectiveness of different types of WCF.Recently,the focus of their studies has shifted to such variables as teacher factors,learner difference,the timing of feedback,and the target structures.Therefore,with a moderating variable of grammatical sensitivity taken into account,this study was conducted to investigate the effects of different types of WCF,including direct WCF and direct WCF plus metalinguistic explanation（ME）,on junior high school students’learning of the present perfect tense.The present study aimed to address two research questions:（1）What are the effects of direct written corrective feedback on junior high school students’ learning of the present perfect tense?（2）To what extent does grammatical sensitivity moderate the effects of direct written corrective feedback on junior high school students’ learning of the present perfect tense?Three classes of students were selected as the participants from the third year of a junior high school in Jiangsu province,totaling 72 students.Each class had 24 students.Two of the three classes were randomly chosen as the experimental groups.One was called direct WCF group and the other direct WCF plus ME group.The third class was treated as the control group.After a pretest,all the students underwent two sessions of treatment during the experiment,and then they were asked to complete a grammatical sensitivity test,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test.The major results of the study were as followed.Firstly,students in two experimental groups outperformed those in the control group in two posttests,indicating direct WCF with or without ME exerted positive effects on junior high school students’ learning of present perfect tense.Besides,DCF plus ME had similar effects to DCF only,but the extra ME still had positive effects on the present perfect learning to a certain extent,because the students in the DCF plus ME group performed better than those in the DCF only group in two posttests.Moreover,great short-term improvements could be found in the immediate posttest from two types of direct WCF,but the long-term effects were not obvious in the delayed posttest.Secondly,students’ grammatical sensitivity could moderate the effectiveness of WCF on the present perfect tense learning.Besides,grammatical sensitivity had greater moderating effects on the efficacy of direct WCF plus ME than on direct WCF only.In other words,students with higher grammatical sensitivity could benefit more from direct WCF plus ME.This study provided further evidence for the effectiveness of direct WCF.Therefore,teachers should use WCF wisely in teaching English.In addition,the author identified the shortcomings of the study and made suggestions for further research.