Effects Of Direct Written Corrective Feedback And Metalinguistic Explanation On Junior High School Students’ Exlicit And Implicit Knowledge Of English Simple Past Tense

Written corrective feedback is an indispensable part of language teaching,and is frequently given in writing teaching.Language knowledge can be divided into explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge,with implicit knowledge serving as the ultimate goal of SLA.To date,quite a number of studies have been conducted on the improvement of the learning of English simple past tense through different types of corrective feedback.However,there are still a dearth of studies exploring the effect of different corrective feedback on its explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge.In teaching writing in junior high schools,most teachers prefer to take the traditional model of corrective feedback,ignoring learners’ self-learning and self-correcting ability.Considering the uniqueness of our country’s educational background and English language level of junior high school students,it is necessary to explore the effects of different kinds of feedback on junior high school students’ English learning and investigate which type of feedback is more effective so as to be integrated into teaching.Direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation are two different ways of conducting written error correction.Although a large number of studies have investigated written corrective feedback,there are not ample comparisons of the efficacy between the two approaches.In light of the aforementioned concerns,the study aims to examine the effects of direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation on L2 learners’explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge of simple past tense.The research questions are as follows:(1)Does direct written corrective feedback(DWCF)affect junior high school students’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of English simple past tense?(2)Does metalinguistic explanation(ME)affect junior high school students’acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of English simple past tense?(3)Is there any difference between DWCF and ME as regards their effects on junior high school students’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of English simple past tense?The subjects of this study were 90 junior high school students in Jiangsu Province.They all came from three intact classes,which were randomly divided into three groups:the DWCF group(n=30),the ME group(n=30)and the control group(n=30).During the whole experiment,all the subjects were required to complete four writings(three topic writings,one writing revision),and two error correction tests.The two experimental groups received the DWCF and ME respectively from the researcher while the control group received no feedback.The target structure was the English simple past tense.All scores were typed into SPSS 25.0 for analysis and research.The main findings of the study are as follows:First,there was a significant difference between the DWCF group and the control group in the post error correction test,indicating that the DWCF group could effectively promote the acquisition of explicit knowledge of English simple past tense.Besides,compared with the first writing,the DWCF group improved in the use of simple past tense in the next two new writings,but the increase did not reach statistical significance.At Time 3,that is,the last topic writing task,there was no significant difference between the DWCF group and the control group.Therefore,it can be drawn that direct WCF was not effective for the implicit knowledge in the long run.Second,the ME group outperformed the control group in the post error correction test,indicating that metalinguistic explanation contributed to the acquisition of explicit knowledge of the English simple past tense.However,apart from the significant improvement of the ME group at the revision of Time 1 writing,the accuracy showed a downward trend in the following two new writings.And at Time 3,the difference between the ME group and the control group was not significant,suggesting that ME failed to promote the acquisition of implicit knowledge in the long run.Third,both direct WCF and ME could significantly develop students’ explicit knowledge in comparison with the control group.But in the post error correction test,there is no difference between direct WCF and ME in developing explicit knowledge.As to the implicit knowledge,neither the DWCF nor ME group showed any improvement in the second and third writing tasks.This suggested,then,that neither of them was effective in developing learners’ implicit knowledge of the English simple past tense.Based on the results and analysis,the study concluded that both direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation are significantly effective in developing students’ explicit knowledge,but there is no significant difference in their efficacy.Besides,as to the acquisition of implicit knowledge,neither of the two kinds of feedback had any significantly positive effects.The study provided empirical support for noticing hypothesis and skill acquisition theory,and further proved that written corrective feedback is effective on SLA.As a consequence,teachers should try using corrective feedback and constantly adjust to the needs of learners in the actual teaching.