The Effect Of Direct Corrective Feedback And Meta-linguistic Feedback On The Ninth Grade Students' Acquisition Of Subject-predicate Agreement

The effect of written corrective feedback(WCF)has been a hot issue in the field of second language acquisition(SLA)for a long time.According to different degrees of clarity and operation modes,WCF can be divided into many specific forms.A review of the existing researches shows that previous researches have mainly focused on the study of direct corrective feedback(DCF),but its effect is controversial.Little attention has been paid to other modes of feedback,especially meta-linguistic feedback(MF).Besides,the existing empirical researches have almost all focused on the relationship between students' acquisition of the third person singular,the indefinite article,the subjunctive mood and the teachers'WCF.Other grammatical items were involved very little.The subject-predicate agreement is a common grammar rule to most students.However,Chinese students often meet difficulty in acquiring it.Therefore,this study took the subject-predicate agreement as the target grammar item,aiming to investigate the effect of DCF and MF on the ninth grade students' acquisition of subject-predicate agreement.Specifically,three research questions are as follows:(1)Do the DCF and MF have a significant effect on the students' acquisition of subject-predicate agreement and is there any difference between their effectiveness?(2)Do the DCF and MF have a lasting effect on the students'acquisition of subject-predicate agreement and is there any difference between their lasting effect?(3)What are the ninth grade students'attitudes toward teachers'WCF?The whole experiment lasted 10 weeks,covering a pretest,six rounds of training activities,an immediate post-test,a delay post-test and a questionnaire survey.All the data collected were analyzed with SPSS 23.0 and the main findings are as follows:(1)In immediate post-test,DCF and MF can effectively promote the students' acquisition of the target grammatical item.There is no obvious difference in the effect of acquisition between the two modes of feedback.(2)In delay post-test,compared with the control group,both DCF group and MF group have a significant lower rate of the subject-predicate agreement errors.It means both modes have lasting effect on the students' acquisition of the target grammatical item.Moreover,the MF has a better lasting effect than the DCF.(3)Most ninth grade students hold a positive attitude towards teachers' WCF.For feedback focus,teachers pay more attention to grammar errors.It meets students' expectations.What's more,students prefer the MF to the DCF.