The Effects Of Teachers' Written Corrective Feedback On High School Learners' Improvement Of Grammar Accuracy

Corrective feedback has become research focus again in SLA field in recent years.Researchers have done quite a lot of researches in corrective feedback as to whether it is effective to promote language accuracy and promote language acquisition.There are some different dividing methods on types of corrective feedback.This thesis adopts focused written corrective feedback(WCF)to do empirical study to explore the effects of high school learners' acquisition of grammar structures.The present study tries to answer following questions:(1)Is WCF effective to promote high school learners' grammar accuracy?(2)If so,are there any differences among different types of WCF?(3)Which type of WCF is more acceptable to learners?This thesis observes pretest-treatment-posttest way and adopts questionnaire to study on the designed questions.There are 56 high school students who participated in this experiment and answer the questionnaires,The 56 students were divided into four groups,each of which has 14 students.These groups were given direct WCF only,direct WCF plus meta-linguistic explanation,indirect WCF and no feedback respectively.The target structures being studied in this thesis are the simple present tense and the simple past tense.After receiving the treatment,these four groups were arranged posttests.The data was analyzed through One-Way ANOVAs and Paired-Sample T Tests.The results of experiment and questionnaire showed as follows:1.Teachers' WCF is effective in promoting high school learners' accuracy of target structure.2.There seemed no significant difference among the three types of written corrective feedback.But according to the results of questionnaire,students preferred direct WCF plus meta-linguistic explanation to two other types of WCF.This can offer implications and significance to senior high school English teaching.This study proves Ferris' idea that written corrective feedback is effective,which can offer practical proof to the research on WCF and offer enlightenment and inspiration to high school foreign language teaching.This thesis also points out some limitations of thisstudy and suggestions as to how to make improvements to further research.