Effects Of Direct Feedback And Indirect Feedback On The Acquisition Of English Simple Past Tense Of Junior Middle School Students

Second language researchers have always been interested in how to modify the errors made by second language learners in the acquisition of the target language.Truscott initially believes that written corrective feedback is ineffective and potentially harmful to second language learners.Contrary to Truscott's supposition,Ferris claims that written corrective feedback can be useful and effective in promoting second language development.A lot of researches have been done to compare the effects of different feedback while few have taken students' linguistic proficiency into consideration.The present study takes junior high school students in Chongqing Yangjiaping Middle School who are of different linguistic proficiency as the subjects to explore the influence of direct feedback and indirect feedback on the acquisition of simple past tense.The research questions in this study include: 1)Do direct and indirect feedback affect the acquisition of simple past tense? 2)Which one is more effective in promoting the acquisition of simple past tense,direct feedback or indirect feedback? 3)Does the students' linguistic proficiency have different effects on their reaction to different feedback?In the study,54 students in a class of Grade 8 are taken as the subjects.The study employs a pretest--immediate post-test--delayed post-test design with three treatment sessions and lasts for 9 weeks.First,all subjects take the pretest which includes narrative writing test and error correction test.Based on the data obtained from the pretest,subjects are divided into direct feedback group,indirect feedback group and control group.Each group is guaranteed to include intermediate proficiency students and low proficiency students,with the overall proficiency level is the same.Text summary task is used as the instrument of treatment.Three groups receive different feedback.For the direct feedback group,the errors are directly underlined and modified;for the indirect feedback group,only the positions of the errors are underlined,leavingthe responsibility of correction to learners.Control group receives no feedback.By collecting the data of the three groups of writing tests and error correction tests in the immediate post-test and delayed post-test,the following conclusions are obtained:Firstly,both experimental groups outperform the control group in the immediate post-test and delayed post-test,indicating that written feedback promotes students' acquisition of simple past tense.Secondly,direct feedback is more effective than indirect feedback in both immediate post-test and delayed post-test.Thirdly,in a short period of time,direct feedback is more effective than indirect feedback for both intermediate proficiency and low proficiency learners.In the long run,however,indirect feedback is more effective than direct feedback for intermediate proficiency learners,and direct feedback is more effective than indirect feedback for low proficiency learners.This experiment proves that written corrective feedback has different long-term and short-term effects on learners of different linguistic proficiency,which enriches the study of written corrective feedback on the acquisition of simple past tense.