An Empirical Study Of Effects Of Direct Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On The Accuracy Of Prepositions In High School Students' Compositions

This thesis aims to focus on the different efficacy of focused and unfocused corrective feedback in the process of acquiring prepositions in writing.Prepositions prove to be a difficult grammatical item for foreign language learners,therefore it's of great significance to improve their ability in this aspect.For students with different learning ability,the most effective type of written corrective feedback is not the same.This study is aimed to work out the three questions:(1)What are the effects of direct focused written corrective feedback on the accuracy of acquisition of the chosen prepositions?(2)What are the effects of direct unfocused written corrective feedback on the accuracy of acquisition of the chosen prepositions?(3)What are the varying effects of these two types for high score,middle score and low score students?In this study,there is a pretest,two tasks,an immediate post test,a delayed post test and an interview.In the process,metalanguage is involved in both direct focused and unfocused written corrective feedback as some previous studies claim that metalanguage doesn't exert positive effects on the acquisition process.The 50 second graders are divided into 5 groups according to the score of the pretest.There are 4 experimental groups and 1 control group.Experimental groups receive direct focused written corrective feedback,direct unfocused written corrective feedback,direct focused written corrective feedback with metalanguage and direct unfocused written corrective feedback with metalanguage respectively.The findings are as follows:(1)Direct focused written corrective feedback prove effective in improving students' accuracy in the use of prepositions.(2)Direct unfocused written corrective feedback is effective in the acquisition process.(3)For high score students,direct unfocused written corrective feedback is the most effective;the direct unfocused written corrective feedback with metalanguage is the best for middle score students;for low score students,however,the direct focused written corrective feedback with metalanguage works the best.The findings show that the two types of written corrective feedback are effective in facilitating students'acquisition of prepositions.Since the effects are varying with regards to students with different English abilities,senior high school English teachers can choose different types of written corrective feedback for students with different levels.This study can provide some constructive suggestions for senior high school teachers.