Effects Of Different Types Of Written Corrective Feedback On Chinese College Students' Acquisition Of The English Past Hypothetical Conditional

There has been a heated discussion over written corrective feedback(WCF)in the field of second language acquisition(SLA)for decades.However,no consensus has been reached on the effects of WCF among researchers in the field of SLA.Currently,although numerous empirical studies of WCF have been conducted,most of these studies targeted article use and past tense in English while other more complex constructions have received scant attention.Moreover,most of previous studies failed to take account of the influence of learners' individual differences on the effects of WCF.As a matter of fact,few studies considered learner factors as a moderating variable in their research framework.In view of the above-mentioned facts,the present study aims to investigate the effects of different types of WCF(DCF,ME,and DCF plus ME)on Chinese college students' acquisition of the English past hypothetical conditional by taking learner differences in grammatical sensitivity as the moderating variable.The research questions addressed in this study are as follows:1.Does written corrective feedback(WCF)help improve Chinese college students' acquisition of the English past hypothetical conditional? If yes,which type is more beneficial: DCF,ME or DCF plus ME?2.Are there any relationships between learning benefits from WCF and learner differences in grammatical sensitivity? If yes,how does the strength of the relationships differ by type of feedback,DCF,ME or DCF plus ME?The participants of this study were 103 first-year English majors from a comprehensive university in Jiangsu province.They were randomly divided into DCF group(26),ME group(26),DCF plus ME group(26)and comparison group(25).The experiment of this study adopted a “pretest-treatment-immediate posttest-delayed posttest” design and lasted for 4 weeks.In the treatment session,the three experimental groups received their corresponding feedback while the comparison group received no feedback.During the three testing sessions,all the subjects were required to finish three similar story reconstruction tasks to measure the subjects' accuracy in using the English past hypothetical conditional and the words-in-sentences test was applied to assess subjects' grammatical sensitivity.SPSS version 16.0 was used to analyze the data collected from the tests.Repeated measures AVONA,independent samples t-tests and Pearson correlations were employed.The major findings are as follows:First of all,all of the three types of WCF were proved to have a positive effect on the learner's acquisition of the English past hypothetical conditional,which indicated that WCF can facilitate learners' acquisition of complex grammatical structures.Secondly,DCF with and without ME proved to be effective on the acquisition of the English past hypothetical conditional in the long term while ME only led to short-term improvements.What's more,the independent samples t-test revealed that supplementing DCF with ME offered little additional benefit to the learners.Finally,the effects of ME in the acquisition of the English past hypothetical conditional can be moderated by grammatical sensitivity.The findings of this study have both theoretical and pedagogical implications.This study provides more empirical evidence to support the positive effect of WCF on SLA and disproves the claim that WCF is ineffective and harmful.It also takes accounts of grammatical sensitivity to investigate its influence on the efficacy of WCF.The results of the study show that WCF is necessary and effective in language learning process,thus English teachers should not hesitate to provide students with various types of WCF in their English teaching because it can draw students' notice of the gap between their interlanguage and the target language,thereby prompting their interlanguage development.Furthermore,grammatical sensitivity was proved to moderate the efficacy of ME in the present study.Therefore,English teachers should pay more attention to students' learning characteristics and give instruction accordingly.