Different Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback

The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the effects of corrective feedback onChinese middle school students’ writing ability. The study attempts to explore whether writtencorrective feedback can improve learner’s language accuracy in writing. If so, which type ofwritten corrective feedback, focused or unfocused, gives more help?The study lasted for seven weeks，with a pretest, two immediate post-tests and adelayed post-test for the data collection process. The participants are48Senior Grade2students chosen from two classes, from a key middle school of Xiangtan City. All thecategories of grammatical errors made by these students in the pretest are counted. Based onthe result, the third person singular verbs and the simple past tense verbs are selected as thetwo target structures in this study. These48students are then divided into three groups, eachgroup consisting of16students. It is ensured that no significant difference on the accuracyscore about these two target structures among these three groups. One group of studentsreceives focused corrective feedback, and only the grammatical errors about these two targetstructures are corrected. The second group of students receives unfocused corrective feedback,and all the grammatical errors are corrected. The third group of students receives nocorrective feedback and no grammatical errors are corrected. The accuracy score about thesetwo target structures of all students’ compositions is counted after the post-tests.One-way ANOVA Analysis, and Paired—Samples T test are the main statisticaltechniques used in this study. the following two conclusions are drawn:1) Experiment Group1and Experiment Group2improve greatly in their accuracy of thetwo target structures. However, Students in the Controlled Group make no apparentimprovement.2) Students in the Experiment Group1improve more than the students in the ExperimentGroup2.Accordingly, some pedagogical implications for second language writing teaching and1earning are given．It is necessary for the teachers to provide written corrective feedback tostudents’ grammatical errors in writing to improve students’ language accuracy. It will bemore effective if teachers select one or two target structures at one time and then providefocused corrective feedback about the target structure(s).