Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On Junior School Students’ English Writing Accuracy

Corrective feedback is always a hot topic in second language teaching and research in recent decades. Its validity is controversial. However, there is no denying that corrective feedback is used to improve students’English writing ability by middle school teachers all the time, and writing corrective feedback is the most traditional and primary corrective method. Even though Truscott is denying the advantages of WCF to improve learners’language accuracy, his opinion is rebutted by so many studies (Ferris&Roberts 2001). Meanwhile, more research turned their eyes to compare the effect of different WCF. In 2014, Shirazi claimed that to give or not to give feedback is no longer the question, because, thus, the majority of studies on feedback. Therefore, which corrective feedback is more effective is being concerned by researchers. Interviews of 26 teachers who are from different junior schools found that most junior school teachers are using traditional unfocused written feedback, while there are a few teachers realized the advantages of focused written feedback. Hence, which kind of written corrective feedback is more effective is still a question in theory research and teaching practice.This study is to investigate the effectiveness of focused and unfocused written feedback on language accuracy of junior school students and try to answer two questions:(1) Is there any difference between effects of focused and unfocused WCF on language accuracy of junior school students?(2) Is there any difference between effects of focused and unfocused WCF on language accuracy of high-score, middle-score and low-score students?The experiment lasted about 8 weeks, involving 122 subjects in 4 classes of grade 7, Liuyang city, Hunan province. According to the results of pretest, the subjects were divided into focused group and unfocused group respectively. Then each group has been divided into high-score, middle-score and low-score groups respectively based on the grades in pretest. Focused group includes 14 subjects with high scores,31 with middle scores and 16 with low scores; unfocused group includes 15 subjects with high scores,30 with middle scores and 16 with low scores.The results indicated that:At first, according to the results of posttest and delayed posttest, the effect of focused WCF is obviously better than it of unfocused WCF for junior school students’English writing accuracy. Then, as for students with different scores, focused WCF is also more effective for high-score, middle-score and low-score groups to improve English writing accuracy. Moreover, even though there are no significant differences in the results of posttest and delayed posttest between high-score groups and in the results of posttest between middle-score groups, the results of delayed posttest between middle-score groups are significantly different and the results of posttest and delayed posttest between low-score groups are significantly different.The outcome of the present study proves the conclusion again that focused WCF is more useful, further confirms that different WCF have different effects to students with different language levels. Therefore, it suggests junior school English teachers to choose WCF methods relating to learners’ actual language levels and to take WCF distinguishingly for students with high, middle and low scores.