The Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On EFL Learners' Acquisition Of Simple Past Tense

Written corrective feedback(written CF)has been of considerable interest to researchers and theorists.In the past decades,they conducted a body of research to explore the effects of written CF on second language acquisition(SLA).However,not much consensus has been reached so far even on the most important questions,like whether written CF is effective on SLA.Also,most of the research chose English articles as the target grammatical structures and few studies targeted at English simple past tense.In this view,the study sets out to explore the effects of written CF provided by the teacher on learners' acquisition of simple past tense,so as to examine the effectiveness of written CF and meanwhile to compare the effectiveness of direct corrective feedback(DCF)with that of metalinguistic explanation(ME)on SLA.The present study adopted a pretest-posttest design.During the three treatment sessions three 30-minute topic writings were conducted and written CF was provided to the written output.The experiment lasted for 7 weeks,and 79 English-as-a-foreign-language(EFL)learners were selected as the participants for the study,who were first-year non-English majors from Zhengzhou University.After the pretest,they were randomly divided into three groups: the DCF group(n = 28),the ME group(n = 25)and the control group(n = 26).During the three treatment sessions,the participants were asked to output three topic writings and received feedback from the researcher accordingly.The two experimental groups got simple past tense errors corrected.The correction given to the DCF group was direct,i.e.,underlining of the errors and provision of the correct forms.The ME group received indirect feedback,i.e.,underlining of the errors and provision of relative written ME without the correct forms.The control group received no written CF on linguistic errors but received general comments on their written output.The pretest,immediate posttest and delayed posttest were in the form of idea-organization tests.The tests were taken by the participants to explore the effectiveness of DCF on EFL learners' acquisition of simple past tense and that of ME,and to compare the relative effects of the two written CF options on EFL learners' acquisition of simple past tense.The results found that participants in the two experimental groups gained significantly higher accuracy than the control group in their use of simple past tense in the immediate posttest.That is,the two written CF options were significantly effective on the development of the target structure in the short term.Also,there were no significant differences between the immediate posttest performance of the DCF group and that of the ME group.That is,the two written CF options were equally effective in the short run.After the two posttests,it was found that ME was effective on short-term and long-term development of the target structure,and thus ME did facilitate SLA.However,the DCF group showed no improvement on the accuracy of use of the target structure in the delayed posttest;that is,the DCF only had a short-term effect but no delayed effect.Thus the DCF had no effects on the acquisition of the target structure.The present research has both theoretical and pedagogical implications.The study contributes a lot to the feedback research base.It investigated the effects of two different written CF options on SLA,providing a fine-grained picture of the relevant studies.Results of the present study showed that ME had greater effects on learners' acquisition of simple past tense.In doing so,it not only extends the knowledge of written CF but enriches the relevant theories,hence providing pedagogical implications for L2 teaching and writing.Teachers should be encouraged to provide learners with effective written CF to facilitate the effects of written CF on SLA.