The Comparative Study On Effects Of Direct And Indirect Written Corrective Feedback On The Writing Accuracy Of Junior High School Students

Teachers'written corrective feedback is an indispensable part in English writing teaching.A majority of previous studies showed that teachers,WCF was of great significance in improving English learners'writing accuracy.However,when looking up previous studies,the author found that most studies on the effects of teachers'WCF on students'English writings usually focused on adopting only one kind of WCF rather than offering specific WCF according to students'writing proficiency.In the present study,the author tried to investigate the effects of direct WCF and indirect WCF given by the teacher on improving writing accuracy for all the participants,and then to make a further comparison between the effects of direct WCF and that of indirect WCF on improving writing accuracy among students with different writing proficiency.In this study,teachers' WCF is defined as a kind of comment on learners' written tasks offered by teachers in order to help students make improvements in their writing compositions.Based on the degree of explicitness of WCF,teachers' WCF can be divided into direct and indirect WCF.Here,direct WCF refers to the teacher giving the correct forms when he recognizes the errors in students'writing compositions;while indirect WCF means the teacher just underlines and specifies the error categories with red pens but without correcting them,instead leaving the students to do it.In this study,one hundred students were chosen from two classes of junior high school in Shenzhen.Forty-nine students from class A received direct WCF,whereas fifty-one students from class B received indirect WCF.All the students in two classes were classified into three groups in accordance with writing scores of their final English examination last semester.The experiment lasted for eighteen weeks,from March to July in 2018.After post-test,eighteen students were chosen randomly from three groups in each class respectively for interview to get to know their expectations and attitudes towards direct WCF and indirect WCF.The present research aims at answering the following questions:1)Which kind of written corrective feedback is more effective in improving the English writing accuracy of junior high school students,the direct one or the indirect one?2)Which kind of written corrective feedback is more effective in improving English writing accuracy of junior high school students with different writing proficiency?3)What are the junior high school students^attitudes and expectations towards direct and indirect written corrective feedback?This study utilized tests and semi-structured interview to investigate the effects of two types of WCF.After data collection,the author used paired samples t test and independent samples t test to examine whether there exist significant differences with SPSS.17.0.Through four-month teaching experiment,the main findings are presented as follows:1)Both direct WCF and indirect WCF could improve junior high school students'English writing accuracy,but there was no significant difference between effects of direct and indirect WCF.2)Indirect WCF improved intermediate-level students',English writing accuracy more effectively,comparing with direct WCF;For low-level students,direct WCF outperformed indirect WCF in improving junior high school students' English writing accuracy;For high-level students,both direct WCF and indirect WCF could improve their writing accuracy effectively.3)Most of students believed that teachers'WCF was significant and effective in improving writing accuracy.With high-level learners,preferring indirect WCF;intermediate-level learners,hoping to receive both direct WCF and indirect WCF;and low-level learners,having preferences for direct WCF.