The Effects Of Metalinguistic Focused And Unfocused Feedback On Senior High School Students’ Writing Accuracy Of Subject-verb Agreement

In second language writing,written corrective feedback(WCF)plays an indispensable role in improving students’ language accuracy in English writing.For foreign language teachers,one of the most effective ways to provide feedback on students’ composition is written corrective feedback.For students,it is a kind of language input and an effective way to consolidate language knowledge in English learning.In recent years,there has been a growing emphasis on written corrective feedback.By searching relative literature at home and abroad,the conclusion can be drawn that few studies are done on metalinguistic explanation feedback for Chinese EFL learners.What’s more,subject-verb agreement is puzzled by many Chinese EFL learners.As a result,a more in-depth investigation in this field is necessary.120 senior high school students from three parallel classes are engaged in this study for 12 weeks,who are randomly chosen as metalinguistic focused class,metalinguistic unfocused class,and the control class.Through interviews,scores of writing tasks and error correction tests,this research seeks to explore the impact of different types of feedback on enhancing students’ writing accuracy.Specifically,there are three research questions involved: 1)Can the accurate use of subject-verb agreement be improved by using different types of feedback? 2)Do metalinguistic focused and unfocused feedback affect different levels(high,middle,low)of students differently? 3)Can different types of feedback affect students’ ability of identifying and correcting errors? By means of SPSS 26.0 and Excel2019 used to analyze data from the experiment,the findings come out.Firstly,metalinguistic focused and unfocused feedback can be efficient in improving the accurate use of subject-verb agreement in writing.Secondly,for both low and middle level students,metalinguistic focused and unfocused feedback have been demonstrated to be useful.Thirdly,both metalinguistic focused and unfocused feedback are helpful for students in identifying and correcting errors.Besides,results from the interview coincide with the empirical findings,which certify the effects of metalinguistic focused and unfocused feedback.In conclusion,this study has confirmed the effect of written corrective feedback and may provide some advisable suggestions in English writing instruction for English teachers.