Effects Of Direct Feedback And Metalinguistic Feedback On Chinese EFL Learners’ Explicit And Implicit Knowledge Of Articles

Written corrective feedback(WCF)is a correction strategy widely used by teachers in foreign language writing classrooms.Previous studies have proved that WCF can develop learners’ explicit knowledge,but its effectiveness in promoting learners’ implicit knowledge is still controversial.In more recent years,researchers have argued that the dispute about the efficacy of WCF might be caused by learners’ individual differences factors like language aptitude,motivation,and L2 proficiency.Therefore,this study aims to investigate the effects of direct and metalinguistic feedback on Chinese EFL learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge of English articles and whether language analytic ability mediates the effectiveness of direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback.26 English undergraduates participated in the study.They were randomly divided into a direct feedback group,a metalinguistic feedback group,and a control group based on their pretest scores.The participants’ explicit knowledge was measured by error correction tests and their implicit knowledge by timed grammatical judgment tests.A language analytic ability test was employed to test participants’ language analytic ability levels.In the feedback treatment sessions,each participant completed two writing tasks and two translation tasks.Then,the correct forms of errors were given to the direct feedback group,while the correct forms with metalinguistic comments were given to the metalinguistic feedback group.In contrast,the control group received no feedback.All participants finished the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest,respectively.The results are as follows.First,both direct feedback and metalinguistic feedback can effectively facilitate learners’ explicit grammatical knowledge of articles,and such effects can be maintained for a longer period.No significant differences were found between the two types of feedback.Secondly,different from the positive effects of WCF on explicit knowledge,neither direct nor metalinguistic feedback can facilitate participants’ implicit knowledge of articles.The results suggest that WCF,as an explicit teaching method,contributes to learners’ explicit knowledge by attracting their attention and leading them to make cognitive comparisons.And finally,participants’ language analytic ability test scores only positively related to their explicit knowledge immediate posttest scores in the direct feedback group,suggesting that learners’ analytic ability mediates the effectiveness of direct feedback rather than that of the metalinguistic feedback.Learners’ language analytic ability mediates the effectiveness of WCF.Learners with high analytic ability benefit more from direct feedback,while metalinguistic feedback is more suitable for learners with low analytic ability because it can compensate for their disadvantage in analytic ability.For learners with high analytic ability,direct feedback offers more opportunities to utilize their ability to infer and summarize grammatical rules.