A Study On The Effect Of Written Corrective Feedback On Junior High School Students' English Past Tense Learnin

As one of the most frequently used items in English,the simple past tense is one of the most important focuses of grammar learning in junior high school.Generally,there are many rules of verb change in the past tense,which has a certain memory burden for junior high school students.Because Chinese don’t have the rules to express the meaning of the past tense by changing the verb form,many students take a lot of effort to accurately grasp this grammar point after learning it.WCF has always been a popular issue in SLA research.The existing research on written feedback is mostly combined with the quality of writing output,which essentially belongs to the measurement of explicit knowledge and also the target grammar structure involved is very limited.This research comprehensively considers the effect of grammar learning from these two dimensions of explicit and implicit knowledge,which is rarely involved.What this study supposed to do is to clarify the different influence of different types of WCF on learning English simple past tense and also their difference of the positive effect of each feedback methods.Learning effect will be measured by explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge.The study took 100 students in Grade two of a junior high school in Shandong Province as subjects and had three experimental groups and a control group.The subjects received the experiment for 8 weeks.It was divided into four stages: pretest,intervention period,post-test and delayed post-test.This study respectively explains these following research questions:(1)Does direct feedback,meta-linguistic feedback and indirect feedback have any influence on junior high school students’ learning of English simple past tense?(2)Is there any difference in the influence of these three WCF ways on improving the learning effect? If so,how does the differences manifest themselves ?This study shows that: firstly,these three feedback methods have an impact on the simple past tense learning of junior high school students.All of these three ways have a significant and lasting impact on the learning of explicit knowledge of the simple past tense.Direct feedback and metalanguage feedback have significant and lasting effects on the learning of the simple past tense implicit knowledge,while indirect feedback has no significant role in promoting implicit knowledge.Secondly,there are differences in the effects of the three feedback methods on improving learning.These three feedback methods have little difference in promoting the immediacy of explicit knowledge learning in the simple past tense,while metalanguage feedback has a significant delay effect on explicit knowledge learning.In promoting the learning of implicit knowledge,metalanguage feedback has the best effect,followed by direct feedback and indirect feedback.This study has enlightening significance.From a theoretical perspective,the results of this study conform to the Interaction Hypothesis,Attention Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis,and enrich the empirical study of these relevant theories in the field of second language grammar teaching and written feedback.At the practical level,this paper discusses the effectiveness of several WCF ways on students’ mastery and internalization of grammar knowledge,adds more empirical support for the positive effects of WCF in promoting learning,and provides some suggestions for English grammar teaching in junior high school.Due to the objective conditions,the study has some limitations,such as insufficient sample representation,limited research period and so on.