Validity Of Metalinguistic Explanation And Direct Written Corrective Feedback On Eap Writing

In recent decades,written corrective feedback has always been a controversial issue in the field of second language writing and second language acquisition.Although there is controversy over whether teacher feedback can contribute to students' second language writing,most studies on feedback provide evidence that it is effective to improve the accuracy of the words used and the quality of the whole writing after students receive teacher feedback for a period of time.So how explicit feedback is provided,in other words,what kind of feedback is more effective,will be a question for us to study.This study focuses on the effectiveness of direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation,as well as the role of direct written feedback and metalinguistic explanation in language acquisition of second language academic writing.In this study,45 Chinese students in the first year of Ph.D.study from a 985 university were selected as the subjects.The experimental design of “pretest – Test 1-intervention-Test 2-posttest” was carried out.The test1 and test2 refer to the introduction writing and methodology writing.The students were divided into three groups by their pretest scores in order to evaluate the validity of the feedback method.The first group is metalinguistic feedback group,in which errors were underlined and five different types of errors were marked with code accompanied by explanation of them.The second group is direct feedback group,that is,same types of errors were underlined and corrected directly by teachers.Group three is control group,and there was no feedback received in this group.The experimental results show that the feedback of metalinguistic explanation is more conducive to the acquisition of relevant grammatical knowledge than direct written corrective feedback.Therefore,this kind of feedback is also more helpful for students to their self-edit and error correction.