Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Direct Written Corrective Feedback On The Acquisition Of English Subject-verb Agreement

While whether giving written corrective feedback could be beneficial on second language learners’language accuracy is still a subject of debate, more and more researchers are now concerned with the way how the written corrective feedback is given and whether this can be effective in helping the learners.The present experimental study tries to investigate whether the focused written corrective feedback can help senior high school students to improve their accuracy in the use of subject-verb agreement and in general grammar. The specific research questions are:1) Does written corrective feedback help EFL learners to improve accuracy use of subject-verb agreement? 2) Which is more effective in improving the learner’s accuracy use of subject-verb agreement, focused or unfocused corrective feedback? 3) What effect does each type of written corrective feedback have on the improvement of EFL learners’general grammar accuracy?The experiment last 8 weeks and the participants were 108 Senior Gradel students who came from 2 intact classes of a key senior middle school in Huichang, Jiangxi Province. The participants were divided into three groups （two experimental groups and one control group） according to their scores in the pretest. The students in group₁ received focused written corrective feedback and only the grammatical errors about subject-verb agreement were corrected. The students in group 2 received unfocused written corrective feedback and all the grammatical errors in this group were corrected. Group 3 is the control group, the students in this group received no written corrective feedback and no grammatical errors were corrected. A pretest, two immediate posttests and a delayed posttest were administered to examine the effects of the experiment.As the results show, the focused group and unfocused group gain higher accuracy scores than the group receiving no written corrective feedback in gaining the subject-verb agreement. The focused written corrective feedback outperformed the unfocused written corrective feedback on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement. The unfocused group was more effective than focused group and control group on the acquisition of general grammar in the short term, but the effect does not maintain in the long term.The study suggests that it is useful to provide written corrective feedback to students on grammatical errors in their witting, and it could be an effective way for teachers to provide focused written corrective feedback on one or two target language structures at one time. Further research could pay more attention to the scale of participants, other types of grammatical errors and the students’ individual differences.