A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On English Generic NPs Acquisition By Senior High School Students

For a long time,the effects of written corrective feedback(WCF)in second language writing teaching have been in debate,and scholars have conducted a large number of empirical studies on different types of feedback.Among them,researches on the effects of focused and unfocused WCF have been increased remarkably,but the results are inconsistent due to the differences in research methods and target structures,and the effects of these two types of feedback have been questioned by some scholars.Therefore,this study focuses on English generic noun phrases(NPs)as the target structure,to further explore the effects of focused and unfocused WCF and the differences in their effects.The present study adopts the experimental research method to explore the following two research questions:(1)What are the effects of focused and unfocused WCF on the acquisition of English generic NPs of senior high school students?(2)What are the differences between the effects of these two types of feedback on the acquisition of English generic NPs by senior high school students?This experiment is based on the Noticing Hypothesis ans Figure-Ground Theory,and lasts for 10 weeks following the quasi-experimental research design with a "pretest-intervention-immediate post-test-delayed post-test" structure.Ninety students from three parallel classes of a senior high school in Guangzhou,Guangdong Province are divided into a focused feedback group(n=30),an unfocused feedback group(n=30)and a control group(n=30).All the participants complete three writing tests to exam the effects of these two feedback methods on the accurate use of English generic NPs,and a questionnaire survey is conducted to assist in testing the effects of the feedback as well as investigating participants’ expectations and preferences for feedback methods.The findings are as follows:(1)Both focused and unfocused WCF can effectively improve the accuracy of English generic NPs in senior high school students’ writing.These two kinds of feedback is helpful to arouse learners’ attention to the incorrect language forms,then perceive the gap between their own interlanguage and the target language,and guide them to reconstruct the language forms of the interlanguage.(2)Focused WCF is more effective than unfocused WCF on the acquisition of English generic NPs in both short term and long term.Focused feedback tagging only English generic NPs errors is more likely to be perceived and absorbed by students,while unfocused feedback tagging all types of language errors makes students’ attention overloaded so as lead to the deficiency of acquisition.In addition,the results of the questionnaire are consistent with the experimental results,which further validates the effects of focused and unfocused WCF on the acquisition of English generic NPs.