The Effects Of Direct Corrective Feedback And Error Coding Feedback On Writing Accuracy Of English Majors

Writing, as a comprehensible output task, requires learners' high proficiency in English. In English teaching, writing is always energy-consuming but it is difficult to be improved. And in the writing teaching of English majors, teachers tend to lay more importance on fluency and complexity than accuracy and pay more attention to the organization and content of students' essays, but ignore the provision of feedback on errors which is the students' expectation. What's more, the agreement about whether corrective feedback is effective and which kind of corrective feedback is more effective has no't been reached yet. Studies on error coding feedback are few, and studies abroad mainly focus on ESL students in colleges or universities,while studies at home mainly focus on students in senior high school and non-English major students in the context of EFL with the disregard of English majors in China. Therefore, this study is carried out to investigate the effects of direct corrective feedback and error coding feedback on English majors' writing accuracy based on the Noticing Hypothesis, the Output Hypothesis and the Interaction Hypothesis.The subjects of this study were from a class at grade 1 in a university and there were 30 students in total. According to the error rate per hundred words in the pre-test,the students were ranked and grouped into two equal groups: Group 1 received direct corrective feedback while Group 2 was provided with error coding feedback. And then they were asked to revise and rewrite their compositions according to the feedback.The experiment lasted for 12 weeks and every student finished 5 compositions in total.After the experiment, a questionnaire was handed out to delve into their perceptions of corrective feedback.The major findings of this study are briefly summarized as follows:Firstly, both direct corrective feedback and error coding feedback can promote the enhancement of English majors' writing accuracy, but have no effect on collocations.Next, although no statistically significant difference was observed between direct corrective feedback and error coding feedback, students who received error coding feedback made fewer errors in the post-test, and English majors prefer error coding feedback to direct corrective feedback according to their responses to the questionnaire.At last, responses to the questionnaire show that English majors attach great importance to corrective feedback from teachers and think it can help them improve writing accuracy. And English majors prefer error coding feedback and feedback with locating the errors and providing metalinguistic explanation.