The Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of English Attributive Clauses

Corrective feedback(CF)has been the focus of second language acquisition(SLA)and L2 writing studies for nearly 30 years.Currently,although a large body of empirical studies of written corrective feedback(WCF)has been made,these studies,on a large part,adopting a research design with a single-factor causal chain,have only investigated the effects of WCF on the acquisition of linguistic features and the relative merits of different types of WCF,ignoring the influence of learners' individual differences and linguistic factors on the effectiveness of WCF and causing the discrepancies among the research results.Actually,few researchers truly included learner factors into their research framework as the moderating variable.As for the linguistic factors,no studies,to the best of our knowledge,have investigated whether WCF might also be effective with more complex constructions(e.g.,syntactic structures).In addition,the nature of errors(e.g.,interlingual errors or intralingual errors)has also been neglected in previous studies,hence failure in revealing the effect of WCF on the acquisition of different linguistic features.In view of the deficiencies of the existing research,the present study attempts to investigate the effects of different types of WCF(reformulation and meta-linguistic feedback)on Chinese learners' acquisition of English attributive clauses by taking language analytic ability as the moderating variable.The specific research questions are as follows:(1)Does WCF have an effect on Chinese learners' acquisition of English attributive clauses?(2)Is there any difference between the effect of reformulation and that of meta-linguistic feedback on Chinese learners' acquisition of English attributive clauses?(3)Is the effect of WCF moderated by learner's language analytic ability? If it is,then how and to what extent is the effect of the two WCF options moderated by learners' language analytic ability?This study adopted the combined design of quantitative and qualitative methods.As for the quantitative method,a “pretest – treatment – immediate posttest – delayed posttest 1 – delayed posttest 2” design was employed.Ninety-two Chinese EFLfreshmen(11 males,81 females)from a university in Jiangsu province were selected to be the subjects of the study,who were divided into a reformulation group(n=31),a meta-linguistic feedback group(n=31),and a control group(n=30).English attributive clauses were chosen as the target structure of the present study for the following reasons.The language analytic ability was measured through the artificial language test developed by Ottó and the effectiveness of WCF was judged by the percentage of the accuracy in using English attributive clauses.The Chinese-English translation was adopted in the four test sessions and the subjects were asked to take a sentence translation test in the pretest,the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest 1,and to finish an essay translation in the delayed posttest 2.In the treatment session,the reformulation group received the correct versions directly and the meta-linguistic feedback group,besides the correct versions,was offered a detailed explanation,with examples,of the principles and characteristics of English and Chinese sentence structure,features and functions of English attributive clauses,and the differences between English restrictive attributive clauses and non-restrictive attributive clauses.The control group did not receive any feedback.The experiment lasted twelve weeks.The qualitative study was conducted in the form of one-on-one interview to get an insight into the affective factors influencing the subjects' processing of the feedback and the effect of WCF.This helps to find out the reasons for the effect of the WCF and the efficacy of the different types of WCF.The interview was carried out after all the tests.The interviewees were selected by their performance on the language analytic ability test and the translation tests,and among them 8 were from the reformulation group,other 8 from the meta-linguistic group and the rest 4 from the control group.The interview lasted from 25 to 30 minutes for each participant.The results of Independent Samples T Test,One-way ANOVA,Post hoc Scheffe test and repeated measures ANOVA showed that:(1)Both the reformulation and the meta-linguistic feedback produced a significant positive effect on learners' use of English attributive clauses,indicating that WCF can facilitate learners' acquisition of global syntactic structures.(2)Both the reformulation and the meta-linguistic feedback exerted positive impact on acquisition of English attributive clauses with a roughly equal effect in the short term,but the latter showed an advantage over the former in the long run,indicating that WCF can help learners to reduce their global interlingual errors and itsefficacy is proportional to its explicitness.(3)There was no significant interaction effect between learners' language analytic ability and WCF,suggesting that the effectiveness of different types of WCF may not be moderated by language analytic ability.This study has both theoretical and pedagogical implications.As some key issues such as the role of consciousness and explicit knowledge in SLA and the cognitive and affective factors affecting SLA are involved,this study can not only provide empirical support for the cognitive theory of SLA,but also help to improve and deepen the theory of foreign language teaching under the framework of the cognitive theory.Pedagogically,since the present study provides evidence for the effectiveness of WCF,it further reveals its enormous potential in facilitating language learning and acquisition,which will certainly shed light on future research and practical pedagogy.Besides,this study can also help teachers to select appropriate WCF effectively for different learners and different linguistic features,thus maximizing the efficacy of WCF in the development of learners' interlanguage.