Effects Of Metalinguistic Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On Chinese EFL Learners' Explicit And Implicit Grammatical Knowledge

Recent years have witnessed increasing research interest in the relationship between second language writing and second language acquisition(SLA).One crucial question is what effect written corrective feedback(WCF)in writing exerts on learners' explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge.Metalinguistic WCF provides certain metalinguistic clue as to the nature of the error.The relationship between metalinguistic focused WCF and explicit grammatical knowledge has been investigated.However,it has been underexplored as for the effect of metalinguistic unfocused WCF on grammatical knowledge.Therefore,this study adopts two different strategies of metalinguistic WCF--focused and unfocused to investigate their effects on explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge respectively and it further discusses the comparative effect of two feedback types on learners' explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge respectively.Metalinguistic focused WCF targets subject-verb agreement(SV)error;metalinguistic unfocused WCF corrects errors on article,preposition,number of noun,and predicate verb along with SV.Eighty-five first-year college students majored in English participated in this study.Based on naturalistic classes,they were put into three groups--a metalinguistic focused WCF group,a metalinguistic unfocused WCF group,and a control group.The study follows an experiment design including pretest,treatment and immediate posttest,and delayed posttest.Three writing tasks were completed during the treatment session,metalinguistic focused WCF was provided for the focused group,metalinguistic unfocused WCF for the unfocused group,and the control group was not provided with any WCF.Error Correction Test(ECT)measured explicit grammatical knowledge and Oral Elicited Imitation Test(OEIT)measured implicit grammatical knowledge.Two major findings are concluded from the present study.To begin with,metalinguistic focused WCF positively affects explicit SV knowledge but metalinguistic unfocused WCF does not promote explicit SV knowledge.On the other hand,metalinguistic focused WCF affects negatively on overall explicit knowledge and also fails to develop the explicit grammatical knowledge of the other four grammatical features.Conversely,metalinguistic unfocused WCF positively affects overall explicit knowledge.In addition,this unfocused strategy stimulates students to develop their explicit grammatical knowledge of article and number of noun but this WCF causes negative effects on preposition and predicate verb.Besides,two experimental groups do not show significant difference compared with the control group as to overall explicit grammatical knowledge.Next,for SV,both metalinguistic focused and unfocused WCF foster its implicit grammatical knowledge.Furthermore,metalinguistic focused WCF positively facilitates overall implicit grammatical knowledge and this strategy simultaneously imbues implicit knowledge of article and number of noun with positive energy.Similarly,metalinguistic unfocused WCF also advances acquisition of overall implicit knowledge and exerts promoting effects on article but regressive effects in preposition.These two strategies do not present obvious differential effects in the aspects of SV and overall grammatical features.To sum up,both of the development in learners' explicit and implicit SV knowledge are positively affected by metalinguistic focused WCF targeting at SV and both types of grammatical knowledge as for overall grammatical features are facilitated by metalinguistic unfocused WCF in a short term.However,the research evidences also show that metalinguistic focused WCF improves overall implicit grammatical knowledge but it is not favorable to promote students' overall explicit grammatical knowledge.In the same vein,metalinguistic unfocused WCF only fosters implicit SV knowledge but no effect on its explicit grammatical knowledge.This finding implies a conditional interface between explicit and implicit knowledge.Based on the findings of the present study,it is implied that teachers should choose appropriate feedback types based on the purpose of developing students' accordant explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge and they also should pay attention to the relationship between the effect of WCF and the developmental trend of different structures'grammatical knowledge during the process of feedback.