The Effects Of Direct And Indirect Written Corrective Feedback On Improving Chinese EFL Learners' Writing Accuracy

Written corrective feedback(WCF)is defined as the provision of information about the ill-formedness of learners' written production(Loewen 2012).The previous studies on WCF mainly focus on its effectiveness or ineffectiveness on L2 writing and which type of WCF is more effective.However,no agreement has been achieved.In addition,there is a lack of research on the effects of different types of WCF on specific type of errors.One purpose of the present study is to examine the published findings on the effectiveness of different types of WCF.There are many types of WCF,and the present study involves both the direct WCF and the indirect WCF.In the present study,the possible effects of the two types of WCF on L2 writing accuracy are investigated and compared.Additionally,the effects of the two types of WCF on reducing the number of errors of different categories are investigated.To achieve the purpose of the study,an experiment was conducted with 66 Chinese EFL learners,and they were randomly assigned into two groups receiving either the direct WCF or the indirect WCF.In the ten-weeks writing practice,all the participants' writings were scored,and the number of errors were counted manually.Then the paired t-test and the independent t-test were used to analyze the data.The findings indicated the ineffectiveness of both direct and indirect WCF on improving Chinese EFL learners' overall writing accuracy,and there is no significant differences found between the two types of WCF in effectiveness.In addition,results also revealed that the direct WCF has no positive effects on reducing the number of any type of errors,and the indirect WCF contributes to reducing the number of noun ending errors only.Based on the results,we tend to recommend not to revise learners' writing errors directly by offering the correct language forms.It is useful to provide the brief meta-linguistic explanation for noun ending errors in L2 writings.The pedagogical implication is that in the teaching of writing,it is worthwhile for teachers to provide written feedback with the correct language forms followed by detailed meta-linguistic explanation.Additionally,the feedback provided should be based on learners' current language proficiency and cognitive capacity.