The Effect Of Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On The Accurate Use Of English Attributive Clauses

Whether to provide written corrective feedback(WCF) in second language writing has been the key question concerned by the scholars in the past several decades. O n this issue, there are two opposite views. One is represented by Truscott who is against written CF. the other is represented by Ferris who holds the opposite view. However, due to the design flaws in the previous studies, no conclusive statement has been reached. Lately, the researchers shifted the focus onto another more important issue, which was how to provide the written CF or what type of written CF can best facilitate language acquisition. Then, the form of focused written CF has been raised to promote language acquisition effectively. However, few studies have been carried out. The few existing studies have proved that focused written CF was effective for the acquisit ion of simple structures.Recently, Ferris(2012) hypothesized that ―written CF might also be effective when focusing on more complex structures(e.g. syntactic structures). Based on this hypothesis, the present study intends to investigate the effect of(direct) focused and(direct) unfocused written CF on the accurate use of English attributive clauses respectively, whether there were significant differences between the two types of feedback, as well as the influence of students‘ language proficiency level on the target structure acquisition when provided with different types of feedback.The study was carried out among 100 subjects and lasted 9 weeks. According to the pretest scores and types of feedback, the subjects were divided into focused, unfocused, practice and control groups. They would receive three tasks, each including writing and error correction test. Besides, the pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest would be taken at the same time. The final of each individual would be expressed by proportions of 100% with the scores of obligatory occasion and correctly supplied ones. In the end, all the scores would be stored and analyzed in SPSS 19.0. One-way ANOVA, Paired-Samples T test and Independent-Samples T test were mainly adopted in this study to examine the differences of and between each group before and after the experiment.The results indicated that, firstly, written CF was effective in improving students‘ writing accuracy, whether it was focused or unfocused. Secondly, there were no significant differences between focused and unfocused groups in the immediate posttest. However, focused group significantly outperformed unfocused group in the delayed posttest. Lastly, both for high and low proficiency level students, focused feedback performed better than unfocused feedback in the immediate and delayed posttests. Except that focused and unfocused group of high proficiency students performed almost the same in the immediate posttest.This study provided positive evidence for the effectiveness of written corrective feedback and some pedagogical implications for the English writing teaching and learning.