The Effect Of Direct Corrective Feedback And Metalinguistic Explanation On The Grammar Accuracy In EFL Writing

Among these researches which investigate the effect of written corrective feedback,just four researches compare the effect of DF and ME on improving the grammar accuracy in EFL writing,and the first research on ME appears in 2013.Therefore,ME is a kind of relatively new WCF strategy to be worth further investigating.Moreover,several researches investigate the effect of WCF on different type of grammatical errors,but the target grammars they choose involve different classification depth of grammatical errors.Therefore,it's unreasonable to get the regular pattern for the change of grammatical errors during the experimental process by comparing these research results.Furthermore,because of the knowledge limit of the researcher,the researcher hasn't find the researches which particularly investigate the special effect that certain WCF of decreasing certain types of grammatical errors.This research explores the effect of direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on the simple past tense,collocation and clause of concession in senior high school EFL writing.Research questions are as follows:(1)Which type of WCF is more effective in reducing grammatical errors on the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test,direct corrective feedback or metalinguistic explanation?(2)What are the change of the regular verb errors(morphological errors),irregular verb errors(morphological errors),collocation errors(lexical errors)and clause of concession errors(syntactic errors)for four Chinese-English sentence translation tests?(3)Do direct corrective feedback or metalinguistic explanation has special effect of decreasing certain types of grammatical errors(regular verb errors,irregular verb errors,collocation errors and clause of concession errors)?The subjects of this experiment are from one nature class in grade one in the Fifth Qin'an Middle School in Tianshui of Gansu Province.The nature class is divided into two group: DF group(34)and ME group(33).The experiment begins from September 20,2016 to November 5,2016 lasting for one and half months.Two groups receive feedback on three grammars: the simple past tense(regular verb and irregular verb),collocation and clause of concession.The study employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design.At first,students translate a short Chinese passage by which the researcher identifies the target grammars,except the simple past tense.Next,there are four times experiments which require students to translate Chinese sentences into English.Each Chinese-English sentence translation test contains around 9 sentences.Translation and revision are all finished in 45-minute class time.Students write at first day and revise on the next day.Six days later,three tests are finished.After two weeks,the fourth test as the delay-test is finished.The research results show that:(1)For immediate post-test,DF and ME don't have significantly difference.For delayed post-test,DF and ME don't have significantly difference.No matter for immediate post-test or delayed post-test,ME is better than DF looking at statistics.(2)For immediate post-test,regular verb errors(morphological errors),irregular verb errors(morphological errors),collocation errors(lexical errors)and clause of concession errors(syntactic errors)significantly decrease.For delayed post-test,regular verb errors(morphological errors),irregular verb errors(morphological errors)and clause of concession errors(syntactic errors)significantly decrease,but collocation errors(lexical errors)increase,though this isn't significant.In addition,different grammars have different speed to improve accuracy within same period: irregular verb is the fastest one;clause of concession is the lowest one;regular verb and collocation have almost same performance.(3)DF or ME don't have special effect of decreasing certain types of grammatical errors.That is,there is no such thing that certain types of WCF strategies have special effect on certain types of grammatical errors.