A Case Study Of Focused Direct And Unfocused Direct Written Corrective Feedback On The Grammatical Accuracy Of Middle School Students' Writings

Writing,one of the four basic skills in English learning,is often considered the most difficult skill to master.According to theories of Noticing Hypothesis(Richard Schmidt,1990)and Output Hypothesis(Swain,1985),teachers' written corrective feedback enables students to notice the gap between the output language they have produced and the target language they are expected to produce.However,the academic community has not yet reached a consensus on which kind of feedback is more effective on writing accuracy.This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of both focused and unfocused direct corrective feedback in improving the grammatical accuracy of writings of middle school students at different proficiency.The research questions are:(1)What effects does focused and unfocused written corrective feedback have on grammatical accuracy of students' writings?(2)For the different levels of students,whether focused and unfocused written corrective feedback have different effects on the improvement of grammatical accuracy of students' writings? If so,what are the differences?(3)What are the different students' perceptions towards focused and unfocused direct written corrective feedback?A three-month experiment was carried out in a public middle school located in Hangzhou.Students in two classes received focused direct and unfocused direct written corrective feedback respectively.All the students were divided into high-level,intermediate and low-level groups before the experiment.Both the qualitative and quantitative methods of research were employed and different research instruments like pretest,writing tasks,questionnaire and interview were used.The data were collected and analyzed in detail by SPSS 23.0.The results show that:(1)both focused direct and unfocused direct corrective feedback can improve the grammatical accuracy of students' writings,but the effect of focused direct written corrective feedback is obviously better than that of unfocused feedback.(2)As for students at different proficiency,focused direct corrective feedback is significantly effective for low-level students whether in a short period of time or in a long run.As to high-level students,there is no significant difference in the effect between two kinds of feedback.For students of intermediate-level,it seems that focused corrective written is slightly better than unfocused feedback but the difference between two kinds of feedback is not significant for intermediate-level students,so the advantage of focused direct feedback to the intermediate-level students can just be considered as reference.(3)Students generally hold positive and supportive attitude towards written corrective feedback.Low-level students prefer focused direct feedback.High-level students favor unfocused direct feedback and expect more feedback on the content,organization and other issues on their compositions.Intermediate-level students vary a lot due to individuality variables,but still support the effect of written corrective feedback on the whole.Therefore,in order to improve the grammatical accuracy of middle school students' writings,it is suggested(1)teachers should provide different kinds of feedback according to students' proficiency;(2)teachers should make attempt to focus on more than one certain type of errors in one time to increase the efficiency of improving students' grammatical accuracy in writing;(3)teachers should be more attentive to students' psychological needs,individuality,learning styles and promote the transformation and diversification of teachers' roles.