Direct And Indirect Written Corrective Feedback's Effects On Second Language Writers' Acquisition Of English Collocations

Written corrective feedback(WCF)has been an intriguing and controversial issue among researchers over the past decades.An accumulating body of relevant literature on the effects of written corrective feedback in the field of second language(L2)acquisition has proved that WCF has contributed to the advancement of acquiring the rule-governed structures.However,few researchers have investigated the effects of WCF on the acquisition of English collocations,which is deemed as a troubling type of non rulegoverned structure in second language writing.Therefore,based on theoretical foundations of Noticing Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis,the valid rationales for the role of WCF in L2 acquisition,this thesis attempts to explore WCF's effects on L2 writers' acquisition of English collocations.Two main research questions are investigated in this study:(1)How does written WCF exert effects on L2 writers' acquisition of English collocations?(2)What distinct effects do the direct WCF and the indirect WCF have on different types of collocation errors in L2 learners' writing?This study lasting sixteen weeks employed a quasi-experimental research design with a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest structure.After the pretest administrated among 112 first-year non-English-majored graduates in Southeast University,69 were selected and randomly assigned into three groups: direct group,indirect group and control group(23 participants for each group).During the experiment,all participants wrote three essays with designated topics and finished four collocation cloze tests,which were followed by various types of corrective feedback(the direct WCF for direct group,the indirect WCF for indirect group and no feedback for control group),and two different questionnaires for the direct group and the indirect group were administrated for the purpose of exploring whether the perceptions of participants to WCF and collocations could affect their performance on the acquisition of English collocations during the experiment.Then data was collected through three main instruments: designated essays,collocation cloze tests and questionnaires before being analyzed by SPSS.The results are shown as follows: a)Both the direct and indirect written corrective feedback are effective in acquiring receptive and productive collocation knowledge.b)Though the direct and indirect WCF produce the similar short-term benefits for their outstanding roles in reducing the frequency of collocation errors on the discoursal level,the indirect WCF yields more long-term effectiveness than the direct WCF on the acquisition of English collocations for L2 writers.c)Of all types of lexical collocation errors,WCF especially the indirect WCF is most effective in reducing the number of verb-noun(cc1)collocation errors,and among all sorts of grammatical collocation errors,verb-preposition(vp1)collocation errors are most affected by WCF.d)The significance of WCF is admitted by participants and the majority of them show their preferences for the indirect feedback.The findings of this research confirm the significance of WCF in acquiring the English collocations in second language writings and thus shed some theoretical and pedagogical lights on future research pertaining to possible effects of WCF on other non rule-governed structures as well as some efficient approaches in learning and teaching of English collocations in L2 writing.