The Effects Of Direct Corrective Feedback And Metalinguistic Feedback On High School Students’ Explicit And Implicit Knowledge Of The English Indefinite Article

The effect of written corrective feedback (WCF) has been a hot issue in the second language acquisition (SLA) field for a long time. Most of the previous SLA studies about WCF centered on investigating the effect of WCF on improving learners’ explicit knowledge. Nevertheless, few studies measured the effect of WCF on learners’ implicit knowledge development. The current study was aimed at discovering the answers to the following three questions:1) What effect does direct corrective feedback (DCF) have on high school students’ explicit and implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article? 2) What effect does metalinguistic feedback (MF) have on high school students’ explicit and implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article? 3) Is there any difference between the effect that DCF and MF have on high school students’ explicit and implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article?The participants of this study were 90 students from three intact classes of a senior high school in Jiangsu Province. The three intact classes were arranged as three groups:the DCF group, the MF group and the control group. Participants in the DCF group (N=30) received direct correction on the indefinite article errors through marking the errors and providing the correct forms. For the MF group (N=30), metalinguistic feedback cards with metalinguistic explanation about the usage of the English articles were distributed to the participants first. Participants in this group need read the card and comprehend the content in it. Then they corrected the indefinite article errors in their previous writing by themselves. Participants in the control group (N=30) did not get any feedback during the experimental process. Their writings with WCF were returned to them after the experiment.The whole experiment lasted 7 weeks, covering three testing periods and one treatment period. The effects of DCF and MF were measured in terms of explicit and implicit knowledge. For Period 1, two tests were carried out:a blank filling test (designed to measure explicit knowledge); writing test 1(designed to measure implicit knowledge). For Period 2, the treatment feedback on writing test 1 and an immediate posttest (writing test 2) were involved. For Period 3, the blank filling test was used again to measure explicit knowledge; and writing test 3 was also conducted. All the data collected were analyzed by the statistic tool of SPSS (16.0). The findings of the current study are as follows:Firstly, all the three groups obtained comparatively low pretest scores in the two tests—the blank filling test and the writing test, which indicated that they didn’t master the usage of the English indefinite article fully. After the treatment period, the DCF group showed salient improvement in the posttest of the blank filling test and outperformed the control group in terms of the explicit knowledge of the English indefinite article.However, no such improvement gained in this group in terms of the implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article. This implied that DCF could result in an improvement in high school students’ explicit knowledge rather than their implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article.Secondly, the MF group got significant improvements in the second administration of the blank filling test (functioned as a delayed posttest) and they performed better than the contro group in this posttest. This suggested that MF was successful in improving high school students explicit knowledge of the English indefinite article. Besides, MF gave rise to improved accuracy in a new piece of writing finished immediately after the treatment; which meant MF had a facilitating effect on high school students’ development of implicit knowledge of the Englisr indefinite article. Thus, MF had a facilitating effect on high school students’both explicit anc implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article.Thirdly, a difference between the effect of DCF and MF on the explicit and implicii knowledge of the English indefinite article was discovered. Both DCF and MF had a facilitating effect on high school students’ explicit knowledge of the English indefinite article whereas DCI had larger influence than MF. However, only MF was successful in improving high school students’ implicit knowledge of the English indefinite article.The present study provides further support for the effectiveness of WCF on English composition instruction. It also advises teachers to adopt appropriate and effective WCF tc correct students’errors and thus improve students’grammatical accuracy in writing. Besides, the researcher also points out the limitations of the study and proposes suggestions for future research.