A Study On The Effect Of Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback On The Predicate Verb Errors In Ninth-grade Students’ English Writing

In the teaching of second language writing,teachers’ written corrective feedback performs important functions in improving the accuracy of learners’ writing.Written corrective feedback,an essential element of the writing process,refers to the teacher’s response to erroneous aspects of the learner’s language output,including giving corrections,making comments,and evaluations.Most of the existing research focus on comparing the effectiveness of different forms of feedback.However,the effectiveness of metalinguistic feedback needs to be further investigated and validated.Therefore,this study takes the predicate verb as the target grammatical item and examines the effects of metalinguistic corrective feedback on predicate verb errors in the ninth-grade students’ English writing in an EFL context.With the guidance of Process Approach,Output Hypothesis,and Error Analysis,this study attempts to answer the following questions:(1)Compared with the traditional feedback,how effective are the two sub-forms of metalinguistic corrective feedback in correcting the predicate verb errors in the ninth-grade learners’ English writing?(2)For different types of predicate verb errors,what is the respective significant effect of the three feedback forms on each type of error? 105 ninth-grade learners from a middle school in Wuhan are selected for a 10-week experimental study conducted by adopting a “Pretest-Intervention-Post-test” design.The participants are divided into three groups with comparable grammatical knowledge levels after the pretest,with the experimental group receiving error code and metalinguistic explanation feedback,respectively,and the control group receiving direct feedback that is used in daily practical teaching.The results indicate that:(1)Metalinguistic written corrective feedback is effective in reducing the overall errors of predicate verbs in the participants’ English writing.For the participants in this study,metalinguistic explanation feedback is the most effective in the three forms of feedback,followed by direct feedback traditionally used by teachers,and finally,error code feedback.(2)From the view of error types,the transitivity and the voice errors are significantly reduced by the intervention of the three feedback forms.Metalinguistic explanation feedback works best on subject-verb agreement and modal verbs errors.For the tense error,which accounts for the most significant proportion in the pretest,the error code feedback is slightly less effective than the other two feedback forms.Finally,it is worth noting that the redundancy and omission of predicate verbs fail to be significantly decreased by the intervention of all three feedback forms.