Investigating EFL Learners' Engagement With Written Corrective Feedback:The Constructs And Influencing Factors

Learner engagement,the efforts made by students to acquire knowledge and internalize academic skills,is closely associated with their learning performance and outcome.As early as in the 1980s,learner engagement was one of the key research topics in the fields of education and psychology and has accumulated a huge bulk of literature.Research on EFL learners' engagement,especially their engagement with written corrective feedback(WCF),however,turned out to be lagging far behind.Over the past decade or so.,the rigorous and systematic research about learner engagement with WCF gradually started to emerge and increasingly gain its prominence in second language writing research.A critical review of previous research shows that teachers'WCF does play a role in developing learners' writing ability,yet large variations are observed in individual learners' improvements.It is found that learners' engagement with the WCF is one of the key factors causing the variations.Thus,to know more about how to optimize the effects of WCF,there is great need to explore learners' engagement with WCF and the influencing factors.According to the relevant literature,most of the previous research tended to gain explanatory results of EFL learners' cognitive,behavioral and affective response to their teachers' WCF and the results were mainly based on case analysis and heuristic interpretation.Although the qualitative research helped with depicting the landscape of learner engagement with WCF,there were few comprehensive and systematic results.Thus,to guide the practice of offering WCF,research conducted with a mixed-methods approach is of great necessity.Also,research on the influencing factors of learner engagement with WCF is of great shortage,which needs further investigation.Adopting a mixed-methods approach,the present study is aimed at exploring both learners' responses to WCF from cognitive,behavioral and affective dimensions,and the correlations among these three sub-constructs of learner engagement.Efforts were also made to reveal the major individual and contextual factors influencing learner engagement with WCF.Based on Han&Hyland's(2015)research results,a questionnaire for EFL learners'engagement with WCF was designed.After the reliability check,the questionnaires were administered on the Star of Questionnaires at a Foreign Studies University in China and 214 valid questionnaires were collected.In addition,semi-structural interviews were conducted with nine EFL learners at the end of the semester,whose drafts over the whole academic semester were collected.After the first round of interviews,four of the interviewees agreed to participate in the second round of the interviews one year later.With the correlational analysis of learners' cognitive,behavioral and affective engagement,as well as the independent sample t test and one-way ANOVA of the possible influencing factors,the following results were found:(1)there was a relatively significant correlations between EFL learners' behavioral and cognitive engagement as well as between behavioral and affective engagement with WCF;(2)as to individual factors,learners'motivations to gain good grades and finish their B.A.thesis significantly influenced their behavioral engagement with WCF;learners' intrinsic interests in English writing significantly influenced their cognitive engagement;and learners' beliefs about the importance of L2 writing significantly influenced their behavioral engagement;(3)as to contextual factors,learners' family background exerted significant influence on their cognitive and behavioral engagement with WCF;their past English learning experience in senior high school was significantly related to their behavioral and cognitive engagement;and their studying years at university were significantly related to their cognitive engagement.According to the deductive content analysis of the interview transcripts and the text analysis of learners' drafts,part of the statistical results gained further interpretations:(1)learners' revision strategies and operations were influenced by their attitude towards WCF,the meta-cognitive strategies they adopted and their cognitive processing after they received teachers',WCF;(2)as to the individual factors,the "internalized" extrinsic English-learning and writing-learning motivations influenced learners' revision strategies and operations,while learners with intrinsic writing-learning motivations tended to process WCF in depth;additionally,learners' beliefs about the significance of learning writing skills influenced their allocation of attention during their revising;(3)as to the contextual factors,well-educated parents' involvement in learners' academic study influenced all three dimensions of their engagement with WCF;moreover,after one-year immersion in the curriculum of English major,learners were inclined to be more critical towards teachers' WCF and were able to be more critical during their cognitive processing of WCF.As shown in the research results,EFL learners' engagement with WCF was identified to be a multi-dimensional construct with complex interrelations between the three dimensions of engagement.Also,the present study could be referred to as an attempt pioneering a mixed-methods approach to explore the influencing factors of learner engagement with WCF by future investigations.From the pedagogical aspect,two suggestions could be proposed by the present study:firstly,EFL writing teachers should go beyond consideration of students' observable behavioral engagement and combine it with their unobservable cognitive and affective engagement in order to evaluate learners' engagement with WCF comprehensively and to offer individualized WCF.Also,teachers could offer help with learners' revision strategies and meta-cognitive strategies according to learners' individual differences and their gaps in educational background for better learner engagement with WCF.