A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Feedback On The Linguistic Accuracy Of High School Students’ Continuation Writing Task

With the advent of the new National College Entrence Examination reform,the linguistic accuracy and coherence of high school students’ continuation writing task have become key elements in the teaching of English writing in high school.The importance for teachers to provide effective feedback for students has also been increased.Relevant research in the field of second language acquisition has shown that explicit and implicit feedback plays a significant role in the areas of oral language teaching and grammar teaching.However,its effectiveness in the area of continuation writing task remains to be investigated.Based on this,this study will compare the effectiveness of explicit and implicit feedback in influencing the linguistic accuracy of high school students’ continuation writing task.This study is based on Schmidt’s Attention Hypothesis,Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Krashen’s Input Hypothesis as well as Pickering and Garrod’s Interactive Synergy Theory.According to the characteristics and objectives of this study,an integrated research process was designed,which is “pre-test-intervention 1-immediate post-test 1-intervention 2-immediate post-test 2-delayed post-test”.Accordingly,a mixed research approach was adopted in this research,which requires a combination of qualitative and quantitative research instruments.Specifically in this study,tests and questionnaires were used to obtain quantitative data,and interviews and classroom observations were used to obtain qualitative data.Complying with the teaching ethics,the two classes involved in this study followed different instructional sequences of explicit and implicit feedback,but ensured that students received the same instructional history.During the implementation stage,a total of 110 first-year students,from two parallel classes of a high school in Harbin,as the subjects of the research,experienced four writing tests over a period of 16 weeks from September 2022 to December 2022.The study sought to address the following questions:(1)What are the differences between explicit and implicit feedback on the impact of writing vocabulary accuracy on high school students’ continuation writing task?(2)What are the differences between explicit and implicit feedback on the syntactic accuracy of high school students’ continuation writing task?(3)Are the attitudes and preferences of high school students towards explicit and implicit feedback the cause of the different responses?In this study,SPSS 25.0 statistical software and Excel spreadsheet were used to sort and analyse the data obtained from the subjects’ four composition tests,and the data collected from the questionnaires,the interviews as well as the classroom observations.The research came to the following findings:(1)Compared with implicit feedback,the effect of explicit feedback was more obvious on improving high school students’ vocabulary accuracy in the continuation writing task(Sig=0.027<0.05).There was an inverse relationship between the subjects’ 100-word error rate scores and their vocabulary accuracy rates.(2)Explicit feedback had a more significant effect on the syntactic accuracy of high school students’ continuation writing task than implicit feedback(Sig=0.026<0.05).The teacher involved provided meta-linguistic explanations so that the subjects could clarify the causes of errors and effectively avoid the recurrence of such errors.(3)High school students’ different responses to explicit and implicit feedback stemed from their attitudes and preferences and were positively correlated with their linguistic accuracy(Sig=0.003<0.05).If high school students were positive about teacher feedback,or they were proactive in the process of fixing errors and summarized the reasons for their errors,they could effectively avoid repeating them.This effectively improved the accuracy of their continuation tasks.Conversely,the teacher feedback received by the high school students did not have the anticipated effect on their accuracy in continuation writing task,resulting in the students’ unsatisfactory performances.In summary,the findings of this study offer the following suggestions to frontline English educators: teachers need to use a combination of explicit and implicit feedback in the actual teaching of continuation task.And teachers should increase the frequency of explicit feedback as much as possible so that students can revise and remember their mistakes.On the contrary,for less difficult grammatical items,teachers are suggested leaving adequate space for students to think independently.Thereby,teachers should use implicit feedback strategies that simply mark errors and reduce the use of explicit feedback.