The Effect Of Focused Direct Written Corrective Feedback On Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition Of Regular And Irregular English Past Tense

This study attempts to investigate the effect of focused direct correctivefeedback (WCF) on Chinese beginner-level EFL learners’ acquisition of regular andirregular forms of English past tense. The WCF options are direct metalinguisticWCF and direct-only WCF. Therefore, the present study tries to provide answers tothe following two research questions:1) Is there any effect of focused direct WCFon Chinese EFL beginner-level students’ acquisition of regular and irregular formsof English simple past tense?2) Is there any difference between direct-only anddirect metalinguistic WCF on Chinese EFL beginner-level students’ acquisition ofregular and irregular forms of English simple past tense? If so, what are thedifferences?In order to answer the two questions, this study adopts a pretest—treatment—immediate posttest—delayed posttest pattern, including a control group receiving noteacher feedback, as well as different writing tasks, error corrections and blankfillings in the pretest and the posttests. On the basis of the above research design anddata analysis, the present study has the following findings:1) in exploring the effectof focused direct WCF, there is main effect for test time and for the interactionbetween test time and correction type, but no main effect for correction type;2) inexploring the effect of different focused direct WCF types, there is significantdifference for test time, but no significant difference between the correction types,nor between test time and correction type.The results of this study suggest that focused direct WCF seems to promote theacquisition of regular and irregular forms of English past tense, and that differentfocused direct WCF treatments may have similar effects on regular past tense (i.e.the rule-based analytical system) and irregular past tense (i.e. the exemplar-based formulaic system). Maybe there is no need to classify regular past tense intorule-based analytic system and irregular past tense into exemplar-based formulaicsystem. In addition, it seems that understanding metalinguistic information is oflittle use in learning the forms of bound morphemes.Theoretically speaking, this empirical study echoes Ferris’ viewpoint of thepositive effect of WCF, and seems to support Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis. Inaddition, it proves the feasibility in the application of a pretest—treatment—immediate posttest—delayed posttest pattern to WCF research. Pedagogicallyspeaking, this study suggests that different focused direct WCF options may producesimilar results in students’ acquisition of regular and irregular forms of English pasttense. So it seems unnecessary to adopt different learning modes as Carr and Curransuggested.