The Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On English Writing Performance Of Senior Middle School Students With Different Working Memory Capacities

Written corrective feedback(WCF)has always been the focus of studies in the field of foreign language acquisition.A lot of researchers were devoted to investigating the effects of various kinds of WCF,but the effects on foreign language learning have no accordant conclusion.In recent years,many researchers have focused on the influencing factors of the effectiveness of WCF.Since language learning is a complex cognitive process,individual cognitive factors play a crucial role in the effect of language learning.The researcher in this study attempted to add the individual cognitive factor——working memory capacity——to the studies of the influencing factors of feedback and to investigate the influence of written corrective feedback(direct feedback and indirect feedback)on English writing of learners with different working memory capacities.So this study discussed two research questions: 1.How does written corrective feedback(direct feedback and indirect feedback)affect the English writing performance of senior high school students with high working memory capacity? 2.How does written corrective feedback(direct feedback and indirect feedback)affect the English writing performance of senior high school students with low working memory capacity?In view of the above research questions,relevant experiments were carried out in this study.The experiment selected a total of 60 Grade One students from class 8 and class 9 of Qinan No.2 Senior Middle School in Tianshui as the testee for an eight-week experiment.In the first week of this experiment,the researcher divided the students into high working memory capacity and low working memory capacity by arranging the span test.Then the students of class 8 and class 9 received direct feedback treatment and indirect feedback treatment respectively.So there were two classes,a total of four groups for this experiment: direct feedback with high capacity group,direct feedback with low capacity group,indirect feedback with high capacity group and indirect feedback with low capacity group.In order to ensure the validity of the experiment,a pretest was carried out in the second week.And feedback exercises were conducted in the following five weeks.In the eighth week,students were required to write a composition whose topic was consistent with that of the pretest,and this writing score was taken as the students' post-test score.After data collection,statistical analysis was conducted and the data were analyzed through Pair-Sample T test and T test of SPSS(version 22.0).The experimental results showed that written corrective feedback had a significant effect on students' English writing performance.However,for students with high working memory capacity,there was no significant difference between direct feedback and indirect feedback.While for students with low working memory capacity,the effect of direct feedback was more significant.The research results really had some reference value for English writing teaching in China.For example,teachers should take individual differences of students(differences in working memory capacity of this study)into account when providing written corrective feedback,and adopt more suitable feedback to different types of students.