The Relationship Between Written Corrective Feedback And The Development Of Explicit And Implicit Knowledge

Written corrective feedback is a widely adopted practice in English classroom.Over the years,there have been two different foci in the field of written corrective feedback,which are SLA and L2 writing respectively.SLA-oriented researchers focus on whether WCF enhances the long-term acquisition of certain linguistic features,while L2 writing-oriented researchers emphasize whether WCF helps learners improve the overall effectiveness of their writing products.This study looks from an SLA perspective on the effectiveness of WCF.Although results from previous studies did not reach a consensus on its usefulness in enhancing L2 grammar knowledge,it is generally agreed that written corrective feedback can be effective depending on the type of feedback and some mediating factors.But many factor combinations are left unexplored.In addition,simple past tense is an error-prone grammar item but research on it is relatively scarce.More importantly,scholars have not yet drawn enough attention to the possible difference of WCF on regular and irregular verbs.WCF has recently proven to have a different effect on structures that are rule-governed and not rule-governed.Thus,this study decides to narrow down the grammar target to simple regular past tense.Besides,to date,most studies adopt writing tasks to test the effectiveness of written corrective feedback,where learners have ample time to access explicit knowledge to monitor their language expression.Yet research is still scarce focusing on WCF pertaining to both explicit grammar knowledge and implicit grammar knowledge.It is also worth noticing that for some research that made endeavors in this direction,there are still rooms for improvement in the research design,such as the chosen way to evaluate explicit and implicit knowledge,and the frequency of feedback.The present study aims to examine the different effects of written direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic feedback on both explicit and implicit knowledge of regular simple past tense for Chinese intermediate level EFL learners,and to provide empirical evidence for L2 writing pedagogy.To that end,this study invited 30 intermediate L2 learners,randomly divided into two experimental groups and a control group,to participate in a 4-week quasi-classroom writing instruction.A pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest research design was adopted for the experiment.During the treatment phase,participants underwent different sorts of feedback,namely DCF,MF,and no feedback on their writing product.Before,immediately after,and one week after the writing treatment,they took Error correction tests and Timed grammaticality judgment tests for the assessment of their explicit and implicit knowledge.An open-ended questionnaire was administered to draw an end to the experiment.The first finding of this research is the effects of writing corrective feedback on learners’explicit grammar knowledge of regular simple past tense in Chinese intermediate level EFL learners.Both direct corrective feedback and metalinguistic feedback exert a significantly positive influence on students’ improvement of explicit knowledge of the language target.But comparatively speaking,MF can generate higher gains for students’ explicit knowledge than DCF,and it sustained for at least 2 weeks.As for DCF,the significant effect diminished after 2 weeks.The second finding is related to the comparative effect of focused direct corrective feedback and focused metalinguistic feedback on learners’ implicit grammar knowledge of regular simple past tense.Only MF can significantly boost the development of implicit knowledge of regular past tense in Chinese intermediate level EFL learners and the effect rarely dissipates over a period of 2 weeks.The quantitative result shows that students can better notice and understand the errors with metalinguistic feedback and they generally expected teachers’ corrective feedback and felt that it helps.But the feedback should be adjusted to the target grammatical structure and students’proficiency level.Future SLA researchers may consider targeting other linguistic types and with participants of different backgrounds to explore the effectiveness of WCF on the development of students’ explicit and implicit knowledge.