Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On The Correction Of Different Errors In English Writing By Senior High School Students

Written Corrective Feedback(WCF),an act of providing feedback information for learners’ language errors in writing,is an indispensable part in real classroom teaching.Ever since Truscott(1996)challenged the effectiveness of grammar corrections,studies on the effects of WCF have sprung up.Furthermore,the past two decades have witnessed the shift of research focus from attesting the effectiveness of WCF at first,then to comparing the relative effectiveness of different WCF strategies,and ultimately to discussing how to make WCF strategies more facilitative for enhancing grammatical accuracy.Correspondingly,the moderating effect that the WCF types and target grammatical items have on the effectiveness of WCF is worthy of study at present.However,most of the studies have only targeted one single grammatical item,and only a few shed light on the relative effectiveness of different WCF strategies on different grammatical errors.Therefore,the present study attempts to investigate the effect of WCF on learners’ grammatical accuracy through targeting the two grammatical errors that are believed to be the most frequent in Chinese senior high school students’ writings(i.e.,verb tense and word order)by focusing on the following research questions:(1)What effects do different types of WCF have on learners’ grammatical accuracy in English writing?(2)How do different types of WCF affect the correction of different types of grammatical errors?(3)Why is the effectiveness of WCF influenced by feedback types and error types?The present study selected as subjects 93 Grade 10 students at a senior high school in Fujian Province,who were evenly divided into one of the three groups based on the scores of their senior high school entrance exam,i.e.,the direct Corrective Feedback(CF)group,the metalinguistic CF group or the control group.A pre-test,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test were conducted to examine the participants’ use of the target grammatical items(i.e.verb tense and word order)under different feedback conditions.Moreover,at the end of the treatment,some randomly-selected participants from the experimental groups were invited for an interview,and the moderating effects feedback types and error types have on WCF effectiveness were comprehensively examined and discussed.The results reveal that: firstly,both direct and metalinguistic WCFs have short-term effects on learners’ overall improvement of grammatical accuracy,with the former one proved to be more durable than the latter in the long term.Secondly,considering the effectiveness of different WCF strategies for different grammatical errors,the direct CF is more beneficial for correcting verb tense errors,while the metalinguistic CF is more effective to improve word order errors.Thirdly,the interview results show that both feedback types and error types have moderating effect on learners’ processing and internalization of the feedback strategies provided.Specifically,in terms of verb tense error,a relatively rule-based grammatical feature,the direct CF can better contribute to learners’ processing of the feedback information as it not only informs learners of the occurrence of the target grammatical errors but also offers clear-cut feedback for their revision.With regard to the word order error,a more idiosyncratic grammatical feature,the metalinguistic CF,compared with the direct CF,is more facilitative for learners’ comprehension and internalization of the feedback information as the obscure and elusive grammatical rules are elucidated in detail,which better promotes the output of the correct linguistic forms.The above findings lead us to conclude that the types of WCF and target grammatical errors have moderating effects on senior high school students’ correction of English language errors in writings.To some extent,it enlightens Chinese senior high school English teachers that they may try to choose appropriate WCF for the correction of different written grammatical errors in order to achieve the best effect.However,the limitation of this study lies in the choice of grammatical errors and feedback types.Therefore,more grammatical errors and feedback types should be included in future studies,and more primary and junior high school students should be invited to participate in the teaching experiment.