The Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On The Acquisition Of Past Tense By Chinese Non-English Majors

The present empirical study aimed to investigate the effects of corrective feedback on Chinese intermediate non-English majors with an attempt to examine the role of two explicit corrective feedback types (direct error correction and meta-linguistic feedback) on the freshmen acquiring the past tense. Specifically, it examined the effectiveness of the single provision of written direct feedback and the combined effects of written direct feedback and written meta-linguistic feedback type on the learners’acquisition of accuracy in different writing sessions.The experiment lasted8weeks and employed a pretest-immediate-posttest-posttest and delayed posttest design including two noticing treatments and an exit questionnaire.36freshmen from Beifang University for Nationalities participated in the research.These subjects were randomly divided into three groups:the WCF group (n=12); the WCF and WME group (n=12) and the control group(n=12).The SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version19.0) was adopted to give the following quantitative and qualitative analysis conclusions by conducting the descriptive statistics, paired-samples T test and paired-samples correlation, one-way ANOVA Analysis and two-way ANOVA Analysis.(1) The pretest showed no significance among the three groups" scores on the accuracy of past tense acquisition. The immediate posttest and posttest scores demonstrated that the two experimental groups all outperformed the control group. The two noticing treatments of the two different feedback types designed for the immediate posttest and posttest revealed sustained effectiveness in the delayed posttest. Again, the delayed effects confirmed the effectiveness of two feedback types both outperforming the control group. However, there was no evidence for the priority of the combined effects of direct error correction and meta-linguistic information feedback over the direct error correction in the four writing sessions.(2) Immediate posttest and posttest were designed to follow their respective noticing treatment for the two experimental groups. Thus, the scores in the immediate posttest and posttest revealed that the noticing WCF treatment demonstrated a significantly correlation with past tense verbs learning.(3) Results of the questionnaire showed that most subjects preferred meta-linguistic feedback and a small part of the subjects held positive views on the self-repair. Learners’cognitive choices indicated that the teachers’written feedback in writing might cover different types of corrective feedback types.The findings reveal a positive effectiveness of direct corrective feedback. The results of this study will provide insight into the role of corrective feedback in ESL in China—a study on different approaches adopted by English teachers to corrective feedback on learners’acquisition of past tense.