An Experimental Research Into The Effects Of Indirect Corrective Feedback On Vocational School Students' English Writing Accuracy

Writing instruction is an important part of English teaching.As an output skill,it reflects students' comprehensive language proficiency.In the vocational schools,due to students' poor English foundation,the primary goal of English writing pedagogy is to improve students' writing accuracy.Thus an experimental research was carried out and comparisons of the effects among different types of indirect corrective feedback were made to explore the most effective type of corrective feedback to improve students' English writing accuracy as well as provide constructive suggestions for future writing teaching.Based on Schmidt's noticing hypothesis,Swain's output hypothesis and Selinker's interlanguage hypothesis,this experimental research was carried out targeting at the effects of indirect corrective feedback on vocational school students' English writing accuracy.The experiment lasted for 14 weeks,during which some multi-draft writing tasks were assigned to students by the researcher.54 Grade-one students majoring in Accounting(in the same class)were divided into three groups according to their scores in the Senior High School Entrance Examination and were given three different types of indirect corrective feedback,respectively indicating and locating errors,underlining the whole sentence containing errors and locating errors with brief grammatical illustration.The research aims to address the following three research questions:(1)Can indirect corrective feedback improve vocational school students' English writing accuracy?(2)To what extent are different types of indirect corrective feedback effective to help improve vocational school students' English writing accuracy?(3)What attitudes do students have towards different types of indirect corrective feedback? Two instruments such as tests and interview were adopted in this research,and Paired-Samples T Tests and One-Way ANOVA were conducted to analyze the collected data.The major findings are concluded from the experiment.(1)Indirect corrective feedback can improve vocational school students' English writing accuracyeffectively and narrows disparity among students in terms of writing accuracy.(2)There are no significant differences among three types of indirect corrective feedback on improving students' English writing accuracy in each group.All three types of indirect CF improve students' writing accuracy in terms of “treatable errors” such as function word and “untreatable errors” such as wrong word.Furthermore,feedback by indicating and locating errors can also reduce “untreatable errors” such as sentence structure errors.Three types of indirect CF can improve the low level students' English writing accuracy significantly.Besides,feedback by indicating and locating errors can improve medium level students' writing accuracy most significantly.(3)According to the results of interviews,students think highly of the positive effects of indirect corrective feedback and like feedback by locating errors with brief grammatical illustration most.The study suggests that English teachers adopt different types of indirect corrective feedback depending on different error categories and students' different levels of writing accuracy.