The Effects Of Different Corrective Feedback Methods On The Acquisition Of Articles In High School Students’ English Writing

Articles are a sort of function words that are most frequently used in English. Although articles arethe earlier grammar category and basic linguistic structure, Chinese learners’ proper use of articles isconsidered as teaching difficulties in second language acquisition. At the same time, articles system ismore complicated, so it is a difficult task for high school learners to master this target structure, resulting infrequent misuses of articles in the process of output and affecting clear referential meaning and discoursegenerative. Thus, articles are chosen as target structure in this paper. In recent years, research focus hasbeen gradually shifting from the learners to instructors. Since there is no specific writing course for highschool students, corrective feedback as a bridge for communication between learners and instructors arealways applied to instruction. However, no decisive agreement has yet been reached on the issue in virtueof different methodology, and there are some flaws in the process of experiment, such as no pretest, no testin the new piece of writing, no control group and without controlling interference variables. In view ofthis, the thesis explores the effects of two different corrective feedback forms, that is, the focused andunfocused feedback, on the acquisition of articles for high school learners. It tries to answer thefollowing three questions:1) Does corrective feedback have effect on the acquisition of articles?2) Can the two different corrective feedback methods produce different effect on the acquisition ofarticles?3) Will learners’ proficiency affect the effects of corrective feedback on the acquisition of articles?The experiment lasted for9weeks, during which a pretest, an immediate posttest and a delayedposttest were carried out. The subjects were102Senior Grade2students, who were all chosen from threeclasses of a key high school in Xinzhou City. In the first week, pretest was conducted. On thefoundation of the pretest results, these subjects were divided into three groups, that is, focused group,unfocused group and control group, each group containing34students. Students in the focused groupjust received corrective feedback on target structure. For the unfocused group, students accepted thefeedback on all the grammatical structures errors. Unlike the foregoing groups, the instructor gave no feedback on the control group. Meanwhile, based on pretest results, students who scored more than50points were defined as high proficiency group; conversely, students who scored lower than50points weredefined as low proficiency group, each group containing51students. Focused group, unfocused groupand control group were divided into high proficiency and low proficiency group. After immediateposttest was carried out, an open questionnaire was sent out. After four weeks, delayed posttest wasconducted and the data was collected. SPSS19.0was adopted to do some quantitative analysis of all thedata. Statistical methods consist of Descriptive Statistics, One-ANVOA Analysis and Non-Parametrictests.By analyzing the data, it can be drawn the following conclusion:1) There was no significant discrepancy among these three groups in the pretest on mastery of thearticles, and all the groups are not perfect in target structure. The accuracy of target structure of studentsin the focused group and unfocused group improve significantly in the delayed posttest and immediateposttest, while the increase amplitude of students in the control group is relatively small, which indicatesthat both these two corrective feedback forms improve the effect on the acquisition of target language.2) In the immediate posttest, there is no significant discrepancy between focused and unfocusedwritten corrective feedback, while the effect of focused feedback is a little superior to that of unfocusedfeedback on the acquisition of target structure; in the delayed posttest, focused feedback is obvious betterthan unfocused feedback.3) Students’ proficiency will also impact the effect of corrective feedback in the improvement oftarget language accuracy. For high proficiency learners, focused feedback is superior to unfocusedfeedback in the short run, while taking the long view, unfocused feedback excels focused feedback; for lowproficiency learners, focused written corrective feedback is much more effective in improving accuracy onthe acquisition of target language, compared with unfocused feedback.This experiment provides evidence for the positive effect of corrective feedback in second languagewriting, and several pedagogical implications on how to correct effectively for future teaching and learningare also given.