Effects Of Direct Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On Accuracy Of The Simple Past In Junior High School Students’ English Writing

Written corrective feedback(WCF)has long been a heated research topic in the field of second language acquisition.In the past decades,scholars have conducted a lot of research on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback,but no consensus has been reached.This study attempts to explore the effectiveness of written corrective feedback and the influence of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on accuracy of the simple past in junior high school students’ English writing.The research questions addressed are as follows:(ⅰ)What are the immediate effects of direct focused WCF and unfocused WCF on accuracy of the simple past used in junior high school students’ English writing?(ⅱ)What are the delayed effects of direct focused WCF and unfocused WCF on accuracy of the simple past used in junior high school students’English writing?This study employed a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-treatment-posttestdelayed posttest design,complemented with a semi-structured interview.The experiment was carried out at a junior middle school in Qingdao with three intact classes.90 students of the three classes were randomly assigned to the direct focused group(FG)and the direct unfocused group(UFG)as the two treatment groups,and the control group(CG).The researcher only corrected errors of the simple past for the direct FG but all grammatical errors for the direct UFG,and provided simple comments and scores for the CG.After the delayed post-test,a semi-structured interview was conducted to further explore participants’preferences of different types of WCF and their attention on the target structure.The interview of 5 participants from each group was recorded first and then transcribed into scripts.The results of this study are as follows:(ⅰ)From a short-term perspective,compared with the CG,both direct FG and UG positively promoted their learning of the simple past,and the promoting effect of direct focused WCF was significantly stronger than that of direct unfocused WCF.This may be attributed to the highly targeted nature of focused WCF that encouraged students to analyze and learn from their tense errors,thus effectively avoiding similar mistakes in their future writing tasks.(ⅱ)From a long-term perspective,both direct FG and UFG outperformed the CG in terms of accuracy of the simple past,though the effects of both the two types of WCF partly faded away over time.Direct focused WCF was superior to direct unfocused WCF in terms of retention.The delayed effect of unfocused WCF disappeared to almost the same as that of the CG.This may be because the comprehensive nature of unfocused WCF placed a heavy cognitive load on the students,making it difficult for them to understand and apply the corrective feedback.The pedagogical implications of this study are as follows:(ⅰ)Teachers should regularly design targeted WCF based on students’ specific learning situations.(ⅱ)Teachers need to consider students’ perception of their mastery of the target structure when making specific teaching plans.