Effects Of Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback On Senior English Writing:From The Perspective Of Grammatical Accuracy

In second language teaching(SLT),teachers’ written corrective feedback(WCF),as an indispensable part,has been concerned and discussed concerning whether it can effectively reduce grammatical errors in the writing and improve the grammatical accuracy of writing.Thus,Many scholars have conducted research on the effectiveness of WCF in writing,most of which has proved that in writing teaching the common feedback forms,direct feedback and indirect feedback,have positive impacts on the improvement of the grammatical accuracy of writing.However,it needs to be further explored whether other WCFs also have the same effectiveness.Therefore,this thesis attempts to experimentally explore the influence of metalinguistic corrective feedback(MCF)on the grammatical accuracy of students’ writing.Based on the Noticing Hypothesis and the Interaction Hypothesis,this study aims to answer two questions: 1.Can both error code corrective feedback(ECCF)and clue-based metalinguistic corrective feedback(CMCF)effectively improve the grammatical accuracy of high school students’ English writing? 2.If the answer of the first question is yes,which feedback is more effective: ECCF or CMCF? In order to answer these two questions,this study conducted a 14-week experiment based on the experimental design of “ pre-test--intervention--post-test--delayed post-test”.A total of 51 senior high school students were acted as the experimental subjects who were divided into three groups: ECCF group,CMCF group and Control group.Each group consisted of 17 participants.For ECCF group,the error code feedback was carried out by which the errors were coded grammatically in writing;For the CMCF group,the metalinguistic feedback was conducted by which the errors were explained grammatically in writing.For the Control group,participants accepted direct feedback used to point out grammatical errors and provide grammatically corrective forms.Through SPSS.21,the data from pre-and post-test,delayed post-test and intervention stage are analyzed,and the results of this study suggest that both ECCF and CMCF can effectively improve the grammatical accuracy of high school students’ writing(p=0.000<0.05).And CMCF group can achieve better results than that of ECCF group.To be specific,both ECCF andCMCF can promote the reduction of verb errors(ECCF: p=0.007<0.05;CMCF: p=0.004<0.05)and noun endings errors(ECCF:p=0.014<0.05;CMCF: p=0.000<0.05)from the perspective of error types.Besides,CMCF can also have a positive impact on the reduction of article errors(p=0.025<0.05).This study confirms the roles of ECCF and CMCF in improving the grammatical accuracy of students’ writing.Through this research,it’s hoped that teachers can better understand the role of the meta-linguistic corrective feedback in the grammatical accuracy of students’ English writing.Therefore,they are expected to apply the appropriate written feedback methods to the grammatical correction in writing and draw the students’ attention to the gap between the grammatical structures of target language and those of their interlanguage in order to correct their grammatical errors and improve their grammatical accuracy of writing.