The Effect Of Written Corrective Feedback On Chinese Middle School Students' English Writing Accuracy

Providing WCF is an important procedure in EFL teaching.Numerous studies have been conducted to explore the effectiveness of written corrective feedback(WCF).However,the results of these studies have reached no consensus.The relevant empirical studies mostly concerning the effectiveness of WCF remain at tertiary level,but few studies further study learners' ability to make self-correction after receiving indirect WCF.The present study seeks to investigate the efficacy of direct and indirect WCF(direct error correction and underlined indirect correction)on the improvement of Chinese middle school students' writing accuracy,explore learners' ability to make self-correction after receiving indirect WCF and learners' attitudes to WCF.The subjects in the present study are 72 students in a middle school in Jinhua,Zhejiang.The study lasted for 8 weeks,during which students were asked to finish three writing tasks,three writing tests,one questionnaire and interview.They were equally divided into three groups according to the error rate in the pretest.The direct group provided direct WCF,the indirect group provided indirect and the control group provided no WCF.After receiving WCF,the direct and control group were required to revise the errors in their writings without handing in the revised draft.But the indirect groups were asked to name and correct the underlined errors as possible and hand in the revised draft,and errors perceived or corrected by students were counted.All groups took part in the pretest,immediate posttest and delay posttest,and the number of errors was counted.To investigate the effect of WCF,the data were stored into SPSS 16.00,and descriptive statistic,one-way AVOVA and post hoc multiple comparison were employed to analyze the data.A questionnaire was distributed to find out students' attitudes to WCF at the end of the empirical study.Afterwards a semi-structured interview was arranged to gain a deeper insight into students' attitudes to feedback,evaluations of the provided teacher feedback and suggestions for giving feedback in writing.The major findings of the current study are briefly summarized as follow:1)both direct and indirect WCF are effective in enhancing middle school students' English writing accuracy,but direct WCF is more effective than indirect WCF;2)students can accurately perceive most underlined errors but were able to correct part of less complicated errors or errors caused by carelessness;3)students hold a positive attitude to the teacher's WCF,and a vast of majority of students show their expectation of acquiring teacher's feedback,especially direct WCF.