A Research On The Effects Of Direct And Indirect Written Corrective Feedback On Senior High School Students’ Learning Of English Relative Clause

Written corrective feedback has been a controversial issue among researchers and theorists. In the past decades, they have explored the effect of corrective feedback in the field of second language acquisition from different perspectives, which proved that WCF plays s key role in EFL learners’ learning of the grammar structures. However, most of the researches have chosen definite and indefinite articles as the target grammatical structures and few have targeted at the relative clause.In view of this, this study focused on the relative clause, aiming to explore the effectiveness of corrective feedbacks and meanwhile to investigate the effects of different written corrective feedbacks(direct WCF and indirect WCF) on EFL learners’ learning of relative clause.Based on Output hypothesis and Noticing hypothesis, the present study is attempted to find answers to the following questions:1) Do direct and indirect written corrective feedback have an effect on improving high school students’ learning of the relative clause, if so, which one is more effective?2) What are students’ attitudes towards teachers’ WCF?The empirical study lasted six weeks and employed a pretest, four treatment sessions and a posttest.There were three treatment conditions, 60 senior one students selected from two intact classes according to their performance in the pretest were randomly assigned into 3 groups: the direct group, the indirect group and the control group. The test papers finished by these three groups during the treatment session were investigated under three different feedback conditions. In correcting the papers of direct feedback group,we underlined the errors and gave the right answers. But in correcting the papers of indirect feedback group we just underlined the errors. And in correcting no-feedback group we just gave the scores. After the posttest, a questionnaire was administrated. Then the data was collected and the researcher used T-tests and one-way ANOVAs to analyze.The results showed that: 1) Both direct and indirect WCF are effective on students’ learning of relative clause. 2) Compared with direct WCF, indirect WCF is more effective on students’ learning of relative clause. 3) Students affirm the importance of written corrective feedback and they show a preference to direct feedback.The result of the study confirmed the significance of corrective feedback in language teaching and thus shed some lights on language teaching and grammar teaching.