The Effect Of Corrective Feedback On Acquisition Of English Passive Voice By Senior High School Students

Direct corrective feedback is such a feedback that teachers correct students’ errors directly under the form or using habit of the right target language.While reformulation is a type of written corrective feedback which means a teacher’s re-expressing students’ written sentences where the error exists,in such a way as to maintain as many of writers’ ideas as possible and make the revised sentences sound native-like.This thesis explores the effects of these two different corrective feedback forms on the acquisition of English Passive Voice for high school students.It tries to answer the following three questions:1)Does corrective feedback have effect on the acquisition of English Passive Voice?2)Do students benefit more from receiving Direct Corrective Feedback than from receiving Reformulation on the acquisition of English Passive Voice?3)What’s the relationship between learners’ language proficiency and the effects of Direct Corrective Feedback and Reformulation?The experiment lasted for 10 weeks with a pretest,a posttest and a delayed posttest.The subjects were 90 Senior Grade 3 students,who were all chosen from three classes of a common high school in Nanchang City.According to the final exam’s grades,the subjects were divided into three groups with similar level: control group(CG),direct corrective feedback group(DG)and reformulation group(RG).Each group contained 30 students.In the direct corrective feedback group,students received the feedback on both the target structure and the content of the writing and teacher corrected their errors clearly and directly.The subjects in reformulation group accepted reformulation on their errors from the teacher without changing their original meaning.Unlike the experiment groups,the teacher gave no feedback on the control group.At the same time,each group was divided into high proficiency group(15students)and low proficiency group(15 students)based on their final exam scores.SPSS 17.0 was adopted to do some quantitative analysis of all the data.Statistical methods consist of One-way ANVOA Analysis and the Independent Sample Test.By analyzing the data,it can be drawn the following conclusion:1)The accuracy of target structure of students of both groups improved significantly in the posttest and delayed posttest,but the students in the control group did not improve much.This indicated that both these two corrective feedback forms improved the effect on the acquisition of target language.2)In the posttest,there is no significant difference between direct corrective feedback and reformulation group.This indicate that reformulation group was not better than direct corrective feedback group.3)Students’ proficiency did not impact the effect of corrective feedback in the improvement of target language accuracy.This experiment provided evidence for the positive effect of corrective feedback in second language writing,and several pedagogical implications on how to correct effectively for future teaching and learning were also given in this thesis.