The Effect Of Different Forms Of Written Corrective Feedback On Junior Middle School Students'acquisition Of English Tense

In recent years,scholars have conducted plenty of research to explore the effect of WCF(written corrective feedback)on SLA(second language acquisition).However,not much consensus has been reached so far on questions like whether different forms of WCF are equally effective.What's more,at present,the research on the effect of different types of WCF on the acquisition of English tense is relatively limited.Influenced by negative transfer,most junior school students often have difficulty in using English tense.Therefore,this study,taking English tense as the targeted grammatical item,combining literature research method with empirical method,aims to investigate the effect of direct corrective feedback(DCF)and metalinguistic feedback(MF)on junior middle school students' acquisition of English tense.The research questions are as follows:(1)Do DCF and MF have effect on the students' acquisition of English tense? If they do,which one is more effective?(2)Is there any difference between the effect on higher-level group and lower-level group in terms of their acquisition of English tense?(3)What are the attitude and preference of students to different types of WCF?The whole experiment lasted eight weeks,covering a pre-test,eight rounds exercises,a post-test and a questionnaire survey.All the data collected were analyzed with SPSS13.0.The results show that:(1)both DCF and MF can promote the students' acquisition of English tense to some degree and MF is more effective than DCF.(2)MF can promote the lower-level students' acquisition of English tense to some degree,but has little effect on higher-level students,and DCF shows no statistical difference between the effect on higher-level and lower-level students' acquisition of English tense.(3)According to the results of questionnaire survey,most junior middle school students hold a positive attitude towards teachers' WCF.And most students prefer MF to DCF.The present study has some theoretical and pedagogical implications.It confirms the importance of WCF in English tense teaching and can offer some reference for English grammar teaching in junior middle schools.