A Study On The Effect Of Integrated Corrective Feedback On The Acquisition Of The Simple Past Tense In Writing

Verbs in English are the essential notional words,which are the core elements in English sentences.In senior high school,the scores of most students' writing are poor,in which there are too many errors,and verbal errors account for a big part of the percentage of making mistakes.Inspired by Sheen's(2009)research where Sheen demonstrated focused corrective feedback(CF)is the most effective option on improving grammatical accuracy while unfocused CF has limited educational value in L2 writing,this paper has investigated whether focused and unfocused integrated corrective feedback(ICF)have different impacts on the accurate use of one target grammatical structure(the simple past tense)by Senior One students with a low intermediate level in the EFL context.Compared the mean scores of three classes' pre-test,70 Senior One students from three intact classes were divided into three groups: a focused group(FG,n=23)focused on correcting one type of errors from the simple past tense,an unfocused group(UG,n=22)required to correct all errors,and a control group(CG,n=25)given no related writing practice and no ICF.During the ten-week research,two experimental groups completed four writing tasks,received four different treatments of ICF and all students took three tests: a pretest,a post-test and a delayed post-test.After the research was over,the collected data was analyzed and compared by using a series of one-way ANOVAs and repeated measures ANOVAs,the conclusion are as follows:First,it is concluded that the two experimental groups outperform the CG in the accuracy use of the simple past tense in the post-test,and FG makes greatest progress,followed by UG and CG in order.It means that for Senior One students with a low English proficiency,both options of ICF: focused and unfocused ICF have positive effect on improving the accuracy of target structure in new pieces of writing in the short run.However,the three groups' means of the individual grammatical scores show a downward trend to varying degrees in the delayed post-test,but compared the scores of the pre-test with the delayed post-test,the improvement of FG is greatest,while the performance of CG is worst,suggesting the CF has positive impact on students' using the past simple tense correctly for longer time after the students received the integrated focused feedback.In a word,the research demonstrates the ICF is an effective teaching method in writing and offers some advice and reference on how to carry out CF efficiently for English teachers.