Effects Of Direct Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On The Accuracy Of Subject-Verb Agreement

In the past several decades,a host of studies on written corrective feedback have been conducted in second language acquisition.In recent years,scholars have focused their research on comparing the effects of focused and unfocused corrective feedback.Most of these researches were conducted under the circumstances of English as a second language,and the subjects are intermediate and advanced English learners,while in the environment of English as a foreign language,few related researches were carried out focusing on lower-intermediate English learners.This study is an empirical study,focusing on lower-intermediate learners of English as a foreign language.The author has adopted a combination of writing experiments and questionnaires to make an attempt to investigate two main issues: 1)whether the provision of written CF can improve students' accuracy of using subject-verb agreement in secondary vocational school students' English writing 2)which type of corrective feedback can better promote lower intermediate EFL learners' accuracy of subject-verb agreement in writing.The experimental results reveal that the direct focused written CF and direct unfocused written CF are both facilitative for the improvement of the accuracy of subject-verb agreement.Besides,the direct focused written CF is more effective than the unfocused written CF in duration and salience.Moreover,the questionnaire results are consistent with the experimental results,assisting in testifying the effectiveness of corrective feedback.It is expected to provide support and evidence for the effectiveness of written CF theoretically as well as furnish Chinese English teachers with some suggestions on how to provide students' with effective written feedback.That is,English teachers should persist in providing students with written CF,and it is advisable for them to choose one specific grammatical structure to give correction at a time,which is more beneficial for students to master the grammar in the long term.Direct focused corrective feedback can significantly assist students to notice and recognize the differences between interlanguage and target language,and to correct grammatical errors themselves when they commit the same errors again.