The effectiveness of two types of corrective feedback on EFL students’ writing : an experimental study

Abstract

The extent to which written corrective feedback benefit learners in developing their writing abilities has been debated for decades. Research has also been continuously conducted to investigate which type of corrective feedback is more effective in improving learners’ writing, yet few studies involved secondary students in mainland China, the majority of whom are low-proficiency learners. This study aimed to 1) examine the effectiveness of written corrective feedback on the writing of secondary school learners within the EFL context in mainland China, 2) investigate whether direct CF is more effective than indirect CF in improving the lower intermediate learners’ writing skills, and 3) explore pedagogical implications of provision of written feedback for teaching English writing. To accomplish these purposes, a seven-week experimental study was conducted to measure how secondary learners respond to different approaches of written corrective feedback in their writing. Eighty-two EFL junior high secondary students from two intact classes taught by the same teacher participated in this study. The participants in the indirect CF group (n=38) received implicit feedback of error underlining while the learners in the direct CF group were provided with error locating and explicit error correcting. The students produced four pieces of writing (pretest, Task 1, Task 2, posttest) that were of the same length and genre (activity plans). Overall evaluation of scores and accuracy performance of three targeted linguistic features (nouns, prepositions and future tense) were assessed. The study found that written corrective feedback, especially direct CF, could result in significant improvement in the learners’ writing scores and the accuracy performance of nouns.