Effectiveness Of Focused And Unfocused Direct Written Corrective Feedback On The Acquisition Of English Simple Past Tense

The first issue on WCF is whether written corrective feedback should be provided. Many supporters and opponents have been in the tit for tat debate over whether the written corrective feedback can improve the language accuracy effectively. Opponents such as Truscott(1996) claimed that written corrective feedback was not effective even harmful, therefore he suggested written error correction should not be provided. While it remains a controversial issue that WCF can be effective to language accuracy, there are more researches inclined to believe WCF are helpful rather than harmful, and an increase of research has been focused on types of CF and survey what kind of written corrective feedback should be provided, in other words, which is more effective. Although the comparison of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback is one of the hot spot, the number of studies which investigate the effectiveness of focused and unfocused WCF is relatively limited and almost all of them investigated ESL learners in the western.By investigating the effects of written corrective feedback on senior high school students' simple past tense acquisition, this study tried to explore 1) whether WCF can improve learner's language accuracy in writing. 2) And direct focused or direct unfocused, which type give more help? 3) What are the attitudes of students towards the provision of written corrective feedback? This experiment lasted for 7 weeks, and 111 subjects were divided into three groups randomly and the there were 37 students in each group. The focused group only got simple past tense errors corrected. The unfocused group received all the grammatical error correction. The control group received no written corrective feedback.The results show students in the two experimental groups gain higher accuracy than the control group in acquiring the past tense in two immediate posttests and delayed posttest.And the focused WCF is more effective on the acquisition of the target grammar in short and long term. The questionnaire shows that most of the participants in the focused and unfocused group claimed they had improved, It showed that participants thought written corrective feedback was effective for them. As to the preferences of WCF, the result showed that most participants wanted their teacher to correct all their errors for them.The present study provides new evidence to the disputable issues in written CF field from the theoretical perspective. The results of the present study provide evidence that written CF, especially focused direct written CF is effective in improving the learners' accurate use of the simple past tense. Therefore, teachers should be encouraged to give participants written corrective feedback for a period of time, which helps students enhance noticing, recognize their problems in their inter-language and push them to replace the incorrect ones with the correct ones.