A Study Of The Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On English Writing Accuracy In Junior High School

Written corrective feedback can be considered as a common practice in the ESL writing classroom where teachers are expected to use written corrective feedback to help students correct their linguistic errors and gradually improve their writing ability.Recently,a great number of studies at home and abroad explore the effectiveness of written corrective feedback on writing,and most of them focus on college or university level.However,the studies about what are the effects of different types of written corrective feedback on English writing accuracy and which type of written corrective feedback is more effective and should be offered by the teacher are relatively limited.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore the effects of two different types of written corrective feedback(dynamic WCF and direct WCF)on English writing accuracy on the basis of the Noticing Hypothesis,the Interaction Hypothesis and Skill Acquisition Theory.This study lasted for twelve weeks,and 86 students in Grade Nine and from Gongming Middle School in Shenzhen participated in the current research.According to the error rate in the pretest,all the participants were divided into two parallel groups:students in Group 1 received dynamic WCF,and students in Group 2 were provided with direct WCF.In the process of experiment,each student needed to complete 5 writing tasks,and revise the writing according to the given feedback.Before and after the experiment,students were asked to take part in the pretest and posttest.This study adopted SPSS 17.0 to analyze the data collected from the pretest and posttest.More specifically,paired sample t-test was used to test the differences of writing accuracy in each group before and after the experiment.And independent sample t-test was used to examine the differences of writing accuracy between the two groups before and after the experiment.At the end of the study,questionnaires were handed out to explore students’ attitudes and preferences for written corrective feedback.After that,15 participants in each group were interviewed to delve into their in-depth evaluation of the two types of written corrective feedback.This study obtains the following findings.First,written corrective feedback has positive effects on the improvement of English writing accuracy.Second,dynamic WCF is more effective than direct WCF in improving English writing accuracy in junior high school.Third,most students affirm the value of written corrective feedback and believe it can help them improve English writing accuracy.Besides,students who received dynamic WCF hold a positive attitude towards it.To sum up,the present study gives some pedagogical implications for how to provide effective written corrective feedback in junior English writing teaching.However,due to the limited personal experience and time,this study needs to be improved and consummated.At the same time,some related suggestions are provided at the end of this thesis for future researches.