A Study On The Impact Of Written Corrective Feedback Upon Junior Middle School Students’ Acquisition Of Third Person Singular Subject In English

Since Truscott(1996) put forward the challenging point that corrective feedback has no good effects on the development of L2 writing accuracy, and even has potentially harmful effects, increasing experimental studies have been done to investigate this. However, there is still no consolidated conclusion whether corrective feedback is effective or not on L2 writing accuracy till now. In addition, the debate on how to give corrective feedback becomes more and more heated.The current study aims to investigate whether written corrective feedback has good effects on improving accuracy of using the target structure in writing and to make a contrast of the effects of two kinds of written corrective feedback, focused corrective feedback and unfocused corrective feedbac k. In this study, the subjects were 82 Junior Grade 1 students from two parallel and intact classes, from Xiaokangying Middle School in Yuzhong County, Lanzhou City. One class was chosen as the control group(N=40), and the other was as the experimental group(N=42). Moreover, the experimental group was equally divided into two groups—the focused group(N=21) and the unfocused group(N=21). This study lasted for eight weeks, including three treatments and three tests, and the third person singular subject was selected as the target structure in this study. The three treatments were conducted once each week and lasted for three weeks, in which all students were asked to write picture compositions, and then the researcher gave students in different groups corresponding feedback in their writings. The three tests involved the pre-test, the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test. In the same way as the treatments, all students were asked to write picture compositions. This time, the teacher just calculated and collected students? accuracy scores of using third person singular subject. In the end, the accuracy scores of using third person singular subjec t of all students? writing tests were analyzed. Paired-samples T test and one-way ANOVAs(SPSS, 17.0 version) analyses were the main statistical techniques used in this study. The following two conclusions were drawn:1) The focused group and the unfocused group improved greatly in their accuracy of using the target structure. However, students in the controlled group made no signif icant improvement.2) Students in both the focused group and the unfocused group improved accuracy of using the target structure. However there was no statistically significant difference between the effects of these two groups.This present study runs counter to Truscott?s(1996) claim that corrective feedback is not only ineffective but harmful, thus it has provided further positive evidence in support of the effectiveness of corrective feedback.