A Study On Effects Of ZPD-Supported Oral Corrective Feedback On College Students' English Writing Proficiency

Corrective feedback and Zone of proximal development are two critical and heated topics in the field of second language acquisition.Previous studies on corrective feedback mainly focused on five aspects: Whether learner's errors need to be corrected? In what way should learner's errors be corrected? When should learner's errors be corrected? Who should provide the correction and What kind of errors should be corrected? By far,plenty of researchers from home and abroad have conducted considerable theoretical and empirical studies on whether oral corrective feedback is effective or not and which type of oral corrective feedback is more effective.Results show that the teacher's oral corrective feedback has positive effect on learners' second language development.The current study combines zone of proximal development theory with oral corrective feedback and employs Sociocultural Theory as the main theoretical foundation,aiming at finding out the effects of ZPD-Supported OCF on college students' English writing.This qualitative research used semi-structured interview and text analysis to address the following three questions: 1.What effect will ZPD-Supported OCF have on college students' English writing proficiency(esp.complexity,accuracy and fluency)? 2.Are there any differences between the students in their writing complexity,accuracy and fluency after received ZPD-Supported OCF? If so,what are the differences? 3.What are the learners' attitude towards the ZPD-Supported OCF? The study included six participants who were chosen from Grade two in a university in Northeast China,they were divided into three groups respectively by higher,middle,and lower English proficiency after the writing test.Researcher took writing topics from previous CET4 as the tool for collecting data,applied ZPD-Supported OCF in six writing training.The results showed that ZPD-Supported OCF have positive effect on six students' writing accuracy while no distinct improvement on writing fluency and complexity.For writing accuracy,the effect on participants in lower English proficiency was more obvious while the effect on participants in higher English proficiency was less significant.As for their attitude towards ZPD-Supported OCF,all six participants showed positive attitude.