A Study On The Effects Of Collaborative And Individual Processing Of Written Corrective Feedback On College Students’ English Writing Accuracy

In recent years,corrective feedback(CF)has been frequently employed in English pedagogy to facilitate students’ foreign language learning.Written corrective feedback(WCF),as one type of CF,holds a crucial place in second language(L2)writing because of its significance in improving writing accuracy.The bulk of studies on WCF abroad and at home have focused on its efficacy,while how to process WCF is less well investigated.Given that,the current study aims to explore the effects of collaborative and individual processing of WCF on college students’ English writing.Building on the cognitive and sociocultural theories that consider WCF a contributor to L2 writing,this study attempts to investigate the effects of students’ collaborative and individual processing of WCF on their revision and the accuracy of their subsequent new writing.Consequently,it is conducted aiming to address the following questions:(1)Do collaborative and individual processing of WCF have effects on students’ revision? If so,what are the effects?(2)If collaborative and individual processing of WCF can improve college students’ English writing accuracy? If so,what progress have they made in writing accuracy?Following a quasi-experimental design,this study adopts a quantitative research method supplied with a qualitative approach.The participants involved 34 non-English major sophomores recruited from the same class in a university.The total students were randomly assigned into collaborative and individual processing groups.They were required to complete three timed written text in seven weeks and revise errors either with peers or by themselves according to indirect WCF provided by the researcher in the form of error codes targeting nine categories of errors.The analysis of students’ revision was based on the number of errors correctly revised,incorrectly revised,and unrevised.Besides,the analysis of writing accuracy depended on two metrics: the number of error-free T-units(A T-unit refers to a main clause with possible subordinate clauses attached.)and the number of errors in the first 100 words.SPSS 24.0 was employed to carry out the quantitative analysis.Conversations in the collaborative processing group were recorded and transcribed for qualitative analysis.The significant findings are as follows:(1)Both collaborative and individual processing of WCF can assist students in revising more errors correctly;(2)Both collaborative and individual processing of WCF is beneficial to writing accuracy development.In the final timed writing,students were able to produce more accurate written text based on the increasing number of error-free T-units and the decreasing number of errors in the first 100 words,regardless of whether students processed WCF collaboratively or independently.Besides,the referential statistics could not indicate that collaboration in response to WCF is outperforming one in terms of the accuracy of their post-test;(3)Word choice and sentence structure are considered the challenging error categories for the majority of students in collaborative and individual processing groups.After treatments of receiving WCF over seven weeks,students tended to produce fewer errors in the final timed writing,especially in the categories of verb,word choice,and noun.The results of this study offer strong evidence proving that collaborative and individual processing of WCF makes a significant contribution to L2 writing accuracy development.Besides,essential implications can be presented for foreign language teaching.Teachers should encourage students to make efficient use of collaborative and individual processing of WCF.