The Effects Of Different Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Teacher feedback,as a key procedure in English writing teaching,is considered as a way to improve students’ English writing proficiency.Many studies compared the effects of metalinguistic corrective feedback with direct corrective feedback,indirect corrective feedback or other ways of written corrective feedback,and the results of most research showed that metalinguistic corrective feedback had better effects.Metalinguistic corrective feedback can provide students with metalinguistic clues,which is conducive to the understanding and revision of feedback.However,few studies explored the influence of the two forms of metalinguistic corrective feedback(metalinguistic explanation feedback and error codes feedback)on writing.Hence,the differences in the effects on writing between metalinguistic explanation feedback and error codes feedback were not clear.Therefore,this study was to explore the efects of teachers’use of the two forms of metalinguistic corrective feedback on senior high school students’ English writing,and the following research questions were explored:(1)What is the distribution of error types in senior high school students’ English writing after giving metalinguistic corrective feedback?(2)To what extent does students’ revision performance with metalinguistic explanation feedback differ from that with error codes feedback?The subjects of this study were two parallel classes of Grade Two in a senior high school,namely experimental group A and experimental group B.Group A used metalinguistic explanation feedback,while Group B used error codes feedback.Writing task was done every two weeks on the answering cards.Students would receive teachers’ metalinguistic corrective feedback after one week and be asked to revise the writing errors on the answering cards according to the metalinguistic corrective feedback.First,the common types of students’ writing errors were counted in the first draft and their distribution was listed,which was based on Ferris’ classification of writing errors.Then,the revision of students’ writing errors in the revised draft was analyzed in line with the Ferris and Hyland’s classification of revision performance.The study lasted for three months and students wrote six compositions.This study selected the data of the first and the sixth compositions for analysis,which aimed at reducing the influence of the experiment and clarifying the effects of the experiment.The findings were as follows:(1)The total number of errors in students’ writing reduced significantly in both metalinguistic explanation feedback and error codes feedback.In terms of the change of error types,there was a significant reduction in students’ errors of "pronoun" and "article" that were given metalinguistic explanation feedback,while students’ errors of "phrase and idiom" that were given error code feedback reduced significantly.Besides,the number of errors of "spelling","preposition","verb form",and "informality" also reduced in the two groups.(2)From the perspective of students’ revision performance,students’ correct revision of writing errors showed significant improvement with metalinguistic explanation feedback,while students’ incorrect revision and no revision of writing errors were significantly reduced.Through error codes feedback,students only had a significant decline in incorrect revision and no revision of writing errors,while there was no significant difference in correct revision.However,compared with error code feedback,metalinguistic explanation feedback was more conducive to improving students’ incorrect revision and no revision of writing errors.