A Study Of The Interaction Between Written Corrective Feedback And Working Memory On Learners’ Grammar Acquisition

Written corrective feedback(WCF)has been widely studied by scholars in foreign language writing teaching.As an important factor affecting learners’ cognitive ability,working memory capacity(WMC)plays an important role in the process of learning languages,but there are few studies investigating the effect of WMC on the WCF.Therefore,this study aims to take it into account and explore its impact on students’ receiving different WCF.This study mainly explores the following four questions:(1)What are the effects of different WCF methods on the accuracy of articles acquisition of junior high school students?(2)Which feedback method,direct WCF or ME,is more effective?(3)How does students’ working memory capacity affect students’ acceptance of WCF?(4)Which WCF is better for learners with different WMC? To address the above questions,this study conducted a six-week teaching experiment with 60 students from a middle school in Fuzhou as subjects.In the first week,students’ different WMC scores were obtained through a reading span test.Students performed four writing tasks from the second week to the sixth week of the experiment.During the experiment,the students in the two treatment groups were given direct corrective feedback(DCF)and metalinguistic explanation feedback(ME)respectively.The scores in the first writing task and the third writing task were recorded as the pre-test and post-test scores,and the fourth writing task was performed to obtain the delayed post-test data.The results show that although both DCF and ME have positive effects on students’ grammar acquisition,students who received ME improved significantly more than those who received DCF.In addition,working memory capacity has an impact on students’ acceptance of WCF.Students with high WMC are more likely to process and store the feedback obtained,while students with low WMC are more suitable for receiving ME,which is clearer and more specific.Therefore,when giving feedback to students in the writing teaching,teachers should take into account the differences in students’ different working memory capacities.