Effects Of Corrective Feedback In ZPD On College English Writing

Writing is an important and difficult element in English learning and teaching. Various sorts of errors are always found in learner's paper. To these errors, how should teachers give efficient corrective feedback? Recently, researchers in the field of second language acquisition have recognized the importance of corrective feedback, and a large amount of research has been conducted. There appears to be a general consensus among the majority of researchers concerning the significance of the role played by corrective feedback. But there is no conclusion on the effects of various types of feedback. Nowadays, to solve these problems, some researchers have taken a different stance on the issue of feedback by examining the question from the perspective of sociocultural theory.The author in this study aims to examine whether corrective feedback provided within the learner's ZPD (zone of proximal development) is more effective than explicit feedback provided irrespective of the learner's ZPD. The ten subjects in the study were selected through simple random sampling from the class taught by the researcher. They were divided into an experiment group and a control group. Each group consists of five subjects. Different kinds of corrective feedback were assigned to different groups for twelve weeks. To be more specific, the experiment group received negotiated corrective feedback within ZPD while control group orally explicit corrective feedback. The results of holistic rating and objective measures revealed that both of the groups have made significant progresses after receiving different treatments, but students in the experiment group outperform those in the control group in holistic quality of the essay and accuracy of the composition.Apart from holistic rating and objective measures in the study, tutorial transcription and interview were employed to support the conclusion drawn from quantitative analysis. The analysis of tutorial transcripts indicated that ZPD feedback is easily internalized; consequently, the students need more implicit corrective feedback when they meet the similar errors. Moreover, the results of interview revealed that students hold positive attitudes toward ZPD feedback and most of them think that their improvement mainly appear in grammar, word choice and sentence structure.The study is of great significance. Theoretically, the study testified the effects of corrective feedback in ZPD in Chinese college English teaching setting. In addition, the results provide a positive evidence for English writing teaching method. In practice, the study offers language teachers another approach to teach English writing. Teachers can provide corrective feedback according to students' ZPD to get better teaching results.