The Effects Of Teachers’ Corrective Feedback On The Linguistic Accuracy And Syntactic Complexity Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Writing

Writing plays an important role in second language acquisition and learning towrite is considered to be the most complex task for the EFL students. The provision offeedback to students about writing isn’t uncommon and has long been used in teachingwriting. However, debate about the value of providing corrective feedback on L2writing has been prominent in recent years. Some scholars such as Truscott(1996) holdthe view that corrective feedback is not useful in enabling learners to improve theirwriting while other researchers such as Ferris (1999) are for corrective feedback in L2writing classes. Therefore, on the basis of the previous empirical studies on the efficacyof written corrective feedback, the current study was undertaken, through an experimentand a questionnaire, to gather evidence to investigate the effects of teachers’ correctivefeedback in Chinese EFL learners’ writing. It is of great theoretical and pedagogicalsignificance.The research aims to investigate whether the different types of feedback (directfeedback, indirect feedback and no corrective feedback) result in improved linguisticaccuracy and syntactic complexity in the writing over a15-week period. To be specific,this research answers the following questions:1. To what extent does the teacher’s corrective feedback help EFL learnersimprove linguistic accuracy in writing over time?2. To what extent does the teacher’s corrective feedback help EFL learnersimprove syntactic complexity in writing over time?3. What are the students’ views of the teacher’s corrective feedback?The subjects involved in this research are the second-year non-English majorsfrom an Institute of Technology in Jiang Su. The90students from6different majorscomprise one big class. The90students were divided into three groups: Group1(directfeedback), Group2(indirect feedback) and Group3(no feedback) with30students ineach. Each student completed four120-word essays during a15-week period. The data were gathered to investigate the effects of teachers’ corrective feedback on linguisticaccuracy and syntactic complexity of Chinese EFL learners’ writing. The accuracyperformance was calculated as the percentage of correct usage of each targetedlinguistic form as John Bitchener (2005) did. The complex performance was calculatedby the number of the complex sentences in the writing. At the end of the research, aquestionnaire was conducted to investigate the students’ views about the teacher’scorrective feedback.The three main findings are displayed as follows:1. The teacher’s corrective feedback can help EFL learners improve linguisticaccuracy in writing over time. Both the teacher’s corrective feedback type and timehave significant main effects on EFL learners’ linguistic accuracy. Among the threefeedback types, indirect feedback group perform best. Direct feedback group are betterthan no feedback group.2. The teacher’s corrective feedback can not help EFL learners improve syntacticcomplexity in writing over time. Time has a main effect on syntactic complexity whilecorrective feedback type has not had any impact on the improvement of writingcomplexity.3. The students believe that they have improved their writing through thefeedback during the research, and they have improved linguistic accuracy and syntacticcomplexity. They appreciate and value the feedback and treatment they received.Meanwhile, they hope to improve their ability to correct errors by themselves.These results indicate that the teacher’s corrective feedback can help EFLlearners improve linguistic accuracy in writing over time. At the same time, to someextent, the results contradict Truscott’s claim that feedback has some negative or noeffect. The research also has important pedagogical implications. On one hand, teachersshould provide feedback, especially indirect feedback, on students’ written production.On the other hand, because the effect of teachers’ corrective feedback is limited,teachers should not only focus their attention on the provision of feedback, but alsodevote more time to developing the students’ ability to correct errors by themselves.