The Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On High School Student’s Writing Proficiency

The effectiveness of written corrective feedback on students’ writing accuracy and fluency has been widely recognized.However,existing studies at home and abroad tend to focus on the effectiveness of direct feedback,indirect feedback,and metalinguistic feedback.Therefore,there is a need to explore studies on focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on senior high school students’ English writing proficiency.The key questions to address the above mentioned study area should include: An exploration of the frequent types of errors in student’s writing;the effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on student’s writing proficiency;the type of feedback that can improve student’s writing proficiency more effectively.To this end,the present study selected 90 senior one students from a high school in the Xuanwei City of Yunnan Province as the research object to explore the effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on senior high school students’ English writing proficiency.Based on the findings of the pretest,the researcher divided three parallel classes randomly into focused class,unfocused class,and control class.The focused class was given focused feedback;the unfocused class was given unfocused feedback;the control class was just given score feedback.The experiment was conducted for a period of seven weeks.Meanwhile,the study adopted an experimental design of the pretest-writing practice-immediate post-test-writing practice-delayed post-test.The experimental process included three writing tests and four writing exercises.The basic process of the experiment was as follows: First,for the pretest results,the researcher counted and recorded the writing errors that students often make.The researcher also recorded the total number of the different common errors in the pretest of the three classes.Secondly,the researcher compared the changes in the total number of errors in the immediate post-test of the three categories.Lastly,in the delayed post-test,the error changes of focused class and unfocused class were compared,and the scores of three classes from the pretest to the delayed post-test were also compared.The experiment show that,the following results were obtained: First,senior high school students often make writing errors in five aspects,including tense errors,subject-verb agreement errors,nominative and accusative errors,article errors,and vocabulary errors.Second,both focused feedback and unfocused feedback can effectively reduce the number of students’ five types of errors and improve their writing proficiency.However,there is no significant change in the control class.Lastly,compared with unfocused feedback,focused feedback can reduce errors significantly and improve writing proficiency.To this end,it means that focused written corrective feedback can perform more effective than unfocused written corrective feedback to improve students’ English writing proficiency.Overall,this study confirms the effectiveness of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on senior high school students’ English writing,ascertaining that focused written corrective feedback performs better than unfocused written corrective feedback.