An Investigation Into The Effect Of Direct WCF And Indirect WCF On Middle School Students’ L2 Writing

English writing, one of the four basic skills of English, plays a dominant role in English learning since it is considered as an indication of one’s integrative language proficiency. Besides, as a productive skill, it increasingly plays an indispensable part in global communication. Therefore, the importance of writing in L2 learning is realized by more and more people, especially teachers and learners in EFL countries. However, the bad performance of Chinese students in their writings arouses scholars’ and teachers’ anxiety. Therefore, scholars at home and abroad pay their efforts to researches on the effectiveness of teacher written corrective feedback (TWCF). But until now, scholars in both second language acquisition (SLA) field and English writing instruction field haven’t arrived at a consensus on whether written corrective feedback (WCF) can contribute to students’ improvement in writing accuracy and which type is more beneficial. Besides, whether WCF can lower students’overall writing quality also increasingly arouses researchers’attention. But compared with studies abroad, researches on WCF in China are quite rare and most of them are restricted to theoretical studies. Most researchers focus their attention on performance of college students or senior high school learners and seldom on junior middle school students. In this case, the present research aims to explore the different effects of direct written corrective feedback (DWCF) and indirect WCF, as well as the influence of WCF on students’overall writing quality. Meanwhile, students’attitudes and preference of direct feedback and indirect feedback are also examined.30 students from Luxiang middle school, Wuhan city, Hubei province have been involved in this research which mainly includes two periods. Six-week writing experiment is the first stage, in which all participants are separated into two groups. Students in direct group receive direct feedback with teacher indicating errors and providing the correct forms; indirect group are given indirect feedback with error underlined and error types provided. At the end of the experiment, the 1st and the 6th draft of each group are collected by the author. The number of errors is counted and the holistic scores are given by the teacher in accordance with the marking criterion for the writing part of English test for the senior high school entrance examination. All data are stored by SPSS 16.0. Independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test are employed to analyze the changes of students’ error rates before and after the experiment so as to compare the effectiveness of direct WCF and indirect WCF on improving students’ writing accuracy. One-way ANOVA and paired sample t-test are adopted to examine whether students’writing quality is lowered or not after the writing experiment. The second stage of the research is the questionnaire survey, through which middle school students’attitudes and preference to direct WCF and indirect WCF are explored.Findings of the present study include the following three aspects:1. Both direct WCF and indirect WCF are effective in advancing middle school students’ L2 writing accuracy. By comparison, direct feedback is more effective than indirect feedback.2. Application of direct WCF and indirect WCF in L2 writing instruction can not lower students’overall writing quality.3. Students in junior middle school hold positive attitudes towards TWCF. A vast majority of students show their expectation of acquiring teacher’s feedback, especially direct WCF.The present study carried out in Chinese EFL context provides theoretical foundation and empirical evidence to relevant studies on WCF and offers pedagogical implications to the teaching and learning of writing in Chinese junior middle school.