The Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Teacher Written Feedback On Language Accuracy In Chinese Junior High School Students’ English Writing

Truscott (1996) challenged the efficacy of written corrective feedback as heclaimed that written corrective feedback was ineffective and even harmful, thusshould be abandoned. Although some researchers (e.g., Truscott,1996,2007; Kepner,1991; Sheppard,1992) agree with Truscott, most researchers (e.g., Lalande,1982;Ferris&Roberts,2001; Chandler,2003) claim that written corrective feedback iseffective on improving learners’ language accuracy. Furthermore, most studies areconcerned with how to provide written corrective feedback, namely, which type offeedback is more effective.The present study was designed to examine the effectiveness of writtencorrective feedback, investigate the effects of focused and unfocused writtencorrective feedback on Chinese EFL junior high school students’ language accuracyin the use of the passive voice in their writing and participants’ attitudes towardscorrective feedback. The experiment lasted ten weeks, involving90participants. Theywere senior students selected from three classes of Tieying junior high school inShandong province. These students were divided into three groups:1) the group ofdirect focused feedback;2) the group of direct unfocused feedback; and3) the controlgroup. A pre-test, an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest were administered toexamine the effect of the experiment. At the end of the experiment, the participantswere also asked to respond to a questionnaire.By analyzing the results of these tests, it was found that the focused groupoutperformed the control group in both the immediate posttest and the delayedposttest. In other words, written corrective feedback can help improve languageaccuracy. This coincides with the studies in favor of written corrective feedback. Itwas also found that there was significant differences between the focused group and the unfocused group in the delayed posttest. Therefore, focused written correctivefeedback is more effective than unfocused written corrective feedback. Thequestionnaire showed that the students valued written corrective feedback, whichindicates that teachers should be confident in providing written corrective feedback.This thesis consists of five parts. The general research background andobjectives of the study are introduced in chapter one. Chapter two presents thedefinition of written corrective feedback, the theoretical framework of the presentstudy and the relevant empirical studies. In the third chapter, the details about thedesign of the experiment including research questions, participants, instruments andthe procedure etc, are presented. Chapter four is concerned with the results of theexperiment and a discussion of the results. SPSS was used to analyze the datacollected during the experiment. In the last chapter, the major findings, pedagogicalimplications and limitations together with suggestions for future studies are provided.