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The Effect Of Focused Written Corrective Feedback On The Accuracy Of The Future Hypothetical Conditionals In English Majors’ L2 Writing

Posted on:2016-05-31Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:W L TangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2295330470964842Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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Since the 1990 s, the effectiveness of written corrective feedback, a commonly-used teaching method, has been a controversial issue in SLA. However, the controversy is still going on(Truscott, 1996,2004, 2010; Ferris,1996,1999,2006;Shintani, 2014). Besides, most previous studies on focused WCF(written corrective feedback) mainly targeted some simple grammar while the relative difficult target structures were rarely studied.The study was conducted in a university in Xiangtan, Hunan Province. First-year English majors were chosen as participants. Combining experiment and questionnaire, the study focused on the following two questions:(1) Is focused written corrective feedback(direct & indirect) effective in improving English majors’ writing accuracy of the future hypothetical conditional? If yes, which one is more effective?(2) Which type of written corrective feedback do learners prefer ?The experiment consisted of five writing tasks and lasted for eight weeks, with a pretest, two treatments, one immediate post-test and one delayed post-test. The questionnaire was conducted in the ninth week. 87 participants from three classes participated in the pretest and filled the basic information form. According to the data collected in pretest, 68 participants from three classes engaged in the following experiment and were randomly divided into three groups: the direct written corrective feedback group(n=22), the indirect written corrective feedback group(n=23) and the control group(n=23). The errors of the target structure that members in the direct WCF group made were marked with the correct forms but for the indirect group, the mistakes were only marked. After the experiment, a questionnaire was conducted in order to further explore the attitude and expectation of students.At last, data collected from the experiment and questionnaire were analyzed by SPSS(16.0). Descriptive statistics and standard means of the three tests were provided. Paired samples T-test and independent samples were also performed.Two major findings emerged. First, both direct focused WCF and indirect focused WCF could improve the writing accuracy of the targeted structure but the control group did not show any change. Comparing the effectiveness of the two types of WCF, indirect WCF could sustain the long-term effect. Second, according to the results of the questionnaire, both types of WCF were embraced by students but indirect WCF(point out the errors with cues for self-correction)was more preferred.
Keywords/Search Tags:focused written corrective feedback, direct WCF, indirect WCF, future hypothetical conditional
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