The Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On Senior High School Students' Accuracy In English Writing

Truscott(1996)claimed that grammar correction was ineffective and even harmful so that it should be abandoned,which made it a hot topic to investigate the efficacy of corrective feedback.Though some scholars(e.g.,Truscott,1996,2007;Kepner,1991;Sheppard,1992)declared the ineffectiveness of teachers' corrective feedback,cumulative research results demonstrated the positive effects of error correction(Sheen 2007,Ellis et al.,2008,Freal et al.2015).Therefore,the question about which corrective feedback approach is more effective has brought into public concern.The New Standard English Curriculum(2017)clearly indicated that the relationship between teaching,learning and evaluation should be dealt with to achieve the goal of promoting teaching and learning by providing evaluation.Teachers can choose immediate feedback or delayed feedback according to the purpose of evaluation activities and students' characteristics.In order to implement the requirements of the New Standard English Curriculum about teaching evaluation and change the present situation of time-consuming but less-efficient written corrective feedback in Chinese senior high schools,the study was designed to explore the efficacy of corrective feedback and investigate the differential effects of focused and unfocused feedback on the acquisition of verbs for senior high school learners.It tries to answer the following questions:(1)Can teachers' written corrective feedback improve senior high school students' English writing accuracy in an EFL context?(2)What are the differential effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on senior high school students' accurate use of English verbs? This experiment lasted for 8 weeks,which includes pre-test,immediate post-test and delayed post-test.The participants were 54 students in Grade 1 in senior high school from Huanggang Foreign Language School in Hubei province.They were divided into 3 groups according to their grades in pre-test: focused group,unfocused group and control group,every group contains 18 students.For the students in the focused group,the teacher selected the grammatical errors of the verbs and corrected them.For unfocused group,the teacher corrected every mistake.For the control group,the teacher only gave scores.All the students take English classes every week,and the target structure is the use of verbs in English writing.SPSS was applied to analyze the data collected during the experiment.By comparing the results of pre-test,immediate-posttest and delayed post-test,we found that the effects of focused and unfocused group in improving students' accuracy of verbs were much more significant than the control group both in the immediate post-test and delayed post-test,which indicates that the teachers' written corrective feedback is effective in improving students' English writing accuracy,at least where English verbs are concerned.Besides,focused group and unfocused group didn't have significant difference in immediate post-test,nevertheless,the two groups showed great difference in delayed post-test.Therefore,focused feedback is more effective than unfocused feedback in general.The results of the study disagreed with Truscott's claim,and provided positive evidence for the efficacy of written feedback.At the same time,it offered some instructive suggestions for the teachers to provide corrective feedback effectively.