Effects Of Two Types Of Written Corrective Feedback On The Improvement Of Tense Accuracy In EFL Learners' English Writing

It is widely acknowledged that corrective feedback(CF)plays an important role in the process of L2 learners' acquisition and correction of linguistic knowledge.L2 language proficiency partly depends on how well L2 learners can adopt the feedback.CF has been becoming a heated research topic in the field of SLA.The question about the role of CF has been debated in the past decades.However,no consensus has been reached on whether CF is effective.The present study attempts to investigate the effects of direct corrective feedback(DCF)and meta-linguistic corrective feedback(MF)on grammatical accuracy of EFL learners' writing in China,and to answer the following three research questions:1.Does written corrective feedback(direct corrective feedback and meta-linguistic corrective feedback)have an immediate effect on EFL learners' accuracy of English tense?2.Is there any significant difference between the effects of direct corrective feedback and meta-linguistic corrective feedback on EFL learners' accuracy of English tense? If yes,what is the difference?3.Is the effect of direct corrective feedback or meta-linguistic corrective feedback on EFL learners' accuracy of English tense retained over time?To find answers to these three research questions,100 non-English major EFL learners from Soochow University were selected and divided into three groups,that is,two experimental groups who received direct CF and meta-linguistic CF respectively and one control group.The present study had a quasi-experimental design with a pretest,a treatment session,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-tests.Group DCF received direct CF with corrections,group MF received feedback with meta-linguistic clues and grammatical descriptions and the control group received no feedback.The experiment lasted 8 weeks.In the first week,a pretest was carried out to test the participants' initial level of their English language proficiency and their knowledge of English tense and In Week 2,a treatment of CF was held.During thetreatment,the participants in the experiment were given 10 minutes to look over the written CF on the pretest.Group DCF received direct CF provided by the researcher in the form of correction,Group MF received meta-linguistic CF in the form of circling,with meta-linguistic clues and grammatical descriptions.And the control group didn't get any feedback.The treatment session,was followed by an immediate post-test in the same week.In Week 8,a delayed post-test was conducted to observe the long-term effect of written CF on EFL learners' acquisition of English tense.The quantitative data was processed by the software of SPSS 17.0.During the experiment,to further explore the individual differences of the effect of written CF between the high achievers and low achievers of their initial knowledge of English tense,there was a tracking study with the participants from the three groups respectively who were divided into high achievers and low achievers according to their performance on tense use in the pretest.The results of Group DCF,Group MF and the control group were compared to find answers to the three research questions.The main findings could be summarized as follows:1.Both direct CF and meta-linguistic CF had a positive effect on the EFL learners' acquisition of English tense in the immediate post-test but different written CF had a more significant immediate effect on the lower achievers.2.Meta-linguistic CF has a seemingly better immediate effect on both the the high achievers and the low achievers.And written CF Direct CF has a seemingly better delayed effect on the high achievers while meta-linguistic CF has a seemingly better delayed effect on the low achievers.But the difference of the immediate effect between direct CF and meta-linguistic CF for the high achievers and low achievers both doesn't reach a statistically significant level.3.The effect of direct CF can be retained over time only for high achievers while not for low achievers.But the effect of meta-linguistic CF on EFL learners' acquisition of English tense can be retained over time both for high achievers and low achievers.The results of the present study provide positive implications for EFL teaching,suggesting that EFL teachers need to pay attention to the selection of different typesof written corrective feedback.Meta-linguistic CF is recommended when the target structure is relatively difficult for L2 learners to figure out the rules of it by themselves.Besides,it implies that teachers should take EFL learners' cognitive abilities,such as language proficiency,into consideration because the extent to which learners could benefit from CF varies from learners with different levels of cognitive abilities.