The Effect Of Different Types Of Direct Written Corrective Feedback On The Improvement Of Students’ Writing Accuracy

Writing has always been considered as a demanding task in English learning to many English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners. Written corrective feedback (WCF) is thus proposed by many western researchers to improve students’writing accuracy. Various studies conducted abroad have proved that written corrective feedback would facilitate learners’competence in writing, but empirical studies of written corrective feedback in Chinese context was limited. Moreover, which type of WCF is more effective has always been a controversial question. Thus the present study aims to explore the effectiveness of two different types of direct written corrective feedback on students’writing accuracy on a range of error types in the real Chinese classroom setting. The study aims to investigate the following research questions:(1) Are the two types of feedback (direct error correction only and direct correction plus meta-linguistic explanation) effective in improving students’writing accuracy? If yes, which type of feedback is better?(2) Are there any differential effects of the feedback types across different linguistic error categories?(3) What are the students’attitudes towards teacher feedback?The60participants were from Fuyang Vocational and Technical College. They were assigned to three equal groups after a pretest:two experimental groups and a control group. Each group was given different feedback types. The study lasted for nine weeks, during which each of the students was required to write seven compositions of the same genre on different topics. At the end of the ninth week, a questionnaire was administered to collect students’attitude toward the feedback that the teacher had adopted, thus two types of data were collected:data from the compositions and data from the questionnaires. The quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS16.0. The major findings of the present study are briefly summarized as follows:(1) Both two types of direct WCF are effective in improving students’writing accuracy.(2) Direct correction plus meta-linguistic explanation can lead to more significant improvements in students’writing compared with direct error correction only.(3) Differential effects of the two types direct WCF on different error categories are found. Direct correction plus meta-linguistic explanation can improve students’ writing accuracy on grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence meaning expression.(4) Most students find teacher’s feedback helpful in improving their English writing accuracy and of the two types of feedback, they prefer direct correction plus meta-linguistic explanation.The present study provides some empirical evidence about the effect of direct written corrective feedback on the improvement of students’writing accuracy. It also gives some pedagogical implications on how to improve the teaching of English writing in Chinese vocational and technical college classroom.