The Effect Of Different Types Of Corrective Feedback On L2 Writing Accuracy Of High School Students

Since the process writing was raised in the L2 writing in 1970s, the feedback has been an important part of teaching. In the history of teaching L2 writing, the importance of error correction has gone through several changes. Before 1970s, the correction of grammar and spelling was the center of L2 writing. Later, due to the influence of the process writing in teaching L1 writing, teachers and students pay more attention to the content, organization and rhetoric. Because the decrease of the focus on language form once happened, the scholars began to worry. They believe, as the L1 learner is essentially different from the L2 learner, teachers should give the students teaching intervention which is different from teaching L1 writing to improve L2 writing. The main form of teaching intervention is corrective feedback.The debate continues between those who believe in giving corrective feedback to students to improve their written accuracy and those who do not. Both classroom teachers and researcher attached importance to error analysis and teacher feedback. Over the last decade, various researchers have explored the role and worth of corrective feedback from different aspects; however, the results were rather conflicting and inconsistent. Truscott (1996:327) believes that grammar correction was both ineffective and harmful, and should be abandoned. But other researchers (Baker & Bricker,2010; Ellis et al.,2008; Ferris,2006; Bichener et al.,2005 etc.) had launched a good many empirical researches, of which the results more or less were in favor of corrective feedback, indicating that corrective feedback was not only helpful for students to self edit but also helpful for them to produce new pieces of writing.To explore the effects of corrective feedback in L2 writing, the study investigated the types of feedback given to 51 high school students in grade 2 of Da Yu Middle School in Jiangxi Province. The experiment lasted 16 weeks. These subjects were divided into the direct group, the indirect group and the control group according to their pretest scores and the types of feedback that they received. Each group was composed of 17 subjects. The direct group (n=17,8 males and 9 females) received direct correction about their linguistic errors in the writing, and some detailed feedback about the content; the indirect group (n=17,13 males and 4 females) got indirect feedback in the form of underlining with the description of the type of the error and some general feedback about the content; the control group (n=17,12 males and 5 females) had no feedback. During the experiment, each subject wrote 8 compositions and revised his/her essay at least once. At the beginning of the experiment, the writing of the three groups was not satisfactory and the quality of the content did not show significant differences. 16 weeks later, the direct group who had received the detailed corrective feedback and the indirect group who got the general feedback significantly improved the content of their writings and the two groups did not have notable differences. However, the control group who did not get any feedback did not greatly enhance their writing content. The study was analyzed quantitatively by using the SPSS, and this thesis provided some constructive suggestions for the foreign language writing. Corrective feedback was an important way which caused learners to notice the gap between their interlanguage and the target language. Moreover, most learners had expectation for teachers' feedback and the feedback was the motivation for them to promote their writing. Therefore, the teacher need to provide systematic feedback to the learners.