Effects Of Direct Written Corrective Feedback And Metalinguistic Explanation On High School Students' Acquisition Of English Articles

Written corrective feedback(CF)is a widely used instructional tool in second language(L2)writing classrooms to help learners improve their writing.However,the debate about the role of written CF has been ongoing among researchers since Truscott's(1996)claim that error correction is ineffective and potentially harmful and should be abandoned.Though the controversy has continued for the past two decades,increasing empirical studies on written CF have provided evidence that students who have received written CF will improve the accuracy of their writing over time.However,teachers may still feel perplexed about whether different types of written CF may have differential effects on L2 writing.In China,the empirical studies on written CF are quite scarce.Therefore,after confirming the positive role of the written CF on the accurate use of English articles firstly,this study attempted to expand the existing research by further examining the effects of direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on Chinese high school students' acquisition of English articles.Additionally,the extent to which learners' linguistic proficiency may affect the efficacy of written CF is also to be explored.The target structure of this study is the English articles which express the first and the anaphoric mention.This study employed a pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest design.The narrative writing tasks and error correction test were employed to measure the effects of CF on the acquisition of English articles.Forty-eight high school students in grade one from Shenzhen Longcheng High school participated in this experiment.The participants were randomly divided into three groups:direct corrective feedback(DCF),metalinguistic explanation(ME)and the control group.For the DCF group,they received the written feedback directly correcting each error involving the referential article use.For the ME group,they received a metalinguistic explanation handout about the target structure.For the control group,no feedback was provided.In addition,based on the pretest writing performance,students who score above 70 correspond to high-level linguistic proficiency,while students who score below 70 correspond to low-level linguistic proficiency.The data was analyzed by SPSS.19.0.The major findings of the current study are presented as following:First,written CF can help high school students improve their accuracy in the use of English articles,thus providing further empirical evidence to rebut Truscott's(1996)claim for the abandonment of written CF.Second,DCF and ME are equally effective in promoting the acquisition of English article use for the first and anaphoric mention.However in the long run,the accuracy improvement of ME seems to be more durable.This finding also constitutes evidence in support of the fact that ME can be a feasible and valuable instructional approach in L2 writing classrooms.Third,learners' linguistic proficiency has influence on the effect of written CF on the acquisition of English articles.For higher level students,only ME has a beneficial effect over time.For lower level linguistic proficiency students,ME was as effective as DCF in the short term,but still ME may have greater potential to improve the accuracy of their writing in the long term.