The Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On EFL Learners' Acquisition Of Articles In Chinese High Schools

Written corrective feedback(WCF),an indispensable session in real classroom teaching,is a process of correcting and giving feedback on students' writings.To students,it is another chance to receive input linguistic knowledge supplementary to their classroom direct linguistic exposure.Studies on written corrective feedback have undergone a shift of research aims:from attesting its effectiveness at the beginning,then to comparing its relative effectiveness and ultimately to discussing how to make WCF more effective.Previous studies have achieved some results in these aspects but as for the last question,both the quantity and the depth obtained are far from adequate,since the issue concerned is related to many factors.In particular,the issue of how to give students more effective feedback according to their ability to do linguistic analysis is worthy of more research efforts.Furthermore,English articles have long been a learning difficulty with which most Chinese learners have problems.And the existing studies have rarely taken high school students as subjects despite the fact that they are in a crucial phase in English learning.In light of these facts,based on the study carried out by Shintani and Ellis(2015),which investigated the mediating effect of learners' language analytic ability on WCF's effectiveness,this thesis further explores the optimum type of feedback for learners with different levels of language analytic ability,expecting to exert some positive effects on the development of English teaching in China's primary and high schools.Research questions to be examined in this thesis are as follows.First,what effects does WCF have on learners' articles acquisition?Second,how does learners' language analytic ability affect WCF's effects?Thirdly,what type of WCF is more effective for learners with different levels of language analytic ability in their articles acquisition and why would language analytic ability affect WCF's effects?To answer the above-mentioned questions,this study selected 77 senior high school students at a school in Zhejiang province as subjects.A pre-test,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test were conducted to examine the subjects' use of the target structure(i.e.expressions with articles)under different feedback conditions and successively a series of analyses were carried out on the collected data.The results reveal that:first,WCF is facilitative to learners' articles acquisition and direct feedback with and without metalinguistic explanation investigated in this study do not have significant differences in their effects but the effect of the latter seems to be longer lasting.Second,learners'language analytic ability is found to be positively correlated to the effect of direct feedback only(i.e.direct feedback without metalinguistic explanation).Thirdly,direct feedback only better suits learners with high language analytic ability while direct feedback with metalinguistic explanation works better for learners with low language analytic ability,for learners with high language analytic ability are more likely to draw grammatical rules for the target structure out of direct feedback only and are able to use them.In comparison,learners with low language analytic ability are slightly inferior,for whom,direct feedback with metalinguistic explanation can reduce the negative impact that deficiency of language analytic ability has on the effect of feedback.