The Effects Of Indirect Focused And Indirect Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback Of Teachers On Learners'Writing Accuracy

In recent decades,teachers' corrective feedback has always been a hot topic in second language research.Its effectiveness is controversial at the same time.In fact,a number of researchers have focused their attention on empirically investigating whether learners benefit from the feedback practice in terms of significantly improving their accuracy.But,it is impossible to reach an agreement,because there are different variables which influence studies.Such variables include the linguistic focus of the feedback and types of feedback(direct,indirect,focused and unfocused).Therefore,the field is in need of conducting studies,before any firm conclusion can be reached.Therefore,the present study aims to compare the effects of focused and unfocused indirect written corrective feedback on accuracy of verb use.Sophomore English major students were chosen as participants.In order to know the effects of focused and unfocused feedback and students' perceptions of them,two research questions are addressed:(1).What effects did focused and unfocused indirect written corrective feedback have on learners' accuracy in English writing ?(2).What are students' attitudes towards the two types of indirect written corrective feedback?The study lasted for six weeks,with a pretest,two treatments,one immediate post-test and one delayed post-test and it consisted of five writing tasks.Each writing task was finished within 45 minutes in class.The questionnaire was filled out and some participants were interviewed in the last week.At first,63 students from two classes engaged in the pretest.The results showed that there were no significant differences in the accuracy of verb usage between two groups.Then,in the next two weeks,students in class one received indirect focused written corrective feedback,which meant that only verb errors(mainly including verb tense;verb voice;subjective-verb agreement;phrasal verb and non-finite verb)were underlined in thewriting,while students in class two received indirect unfocused written corrective feedback,which meant that all errors were underlined in the writing.A number of findings were revealed in this study.First all of,both two experimental groups gained grammatical accuracy over time in the post-tests,which suggested written corrective feedback can contribute to grammatical accuracy in L2 writing.Then,there were no significant differences between the two groups in post-tests.Therefore,it was hard to say which type of error feedback was more effective in improving students' writing accuracy.Besides,as for the students' perceptions of written corrective feedback,a majority of the students showed positive attitude towards and preferred to receive focused written corrective feedback.