Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On Chinese High School Efl Learners’ Grammar Accuracy In English

Writing,which is a necessary skill of English learning and a dispensable way of output,is also an indication of one’s integrative language proficiency.However,English writing became a weakness of middle school students in China.It is difficult for students to improve their writing proficiency,which also confronts teachers in school.In recent years,studies on written corrective feedback aroused much attention in China and aboard.Scholars pay their efforts to the research on effectiveness and efficacy of written corrective feedback,direct feedback and indirect feedback.Until now,no consensus has been reached by scholars in second language acquisition field on whether written corrective feedback contributes to students’grammar accuracy.Therefore,this study,based on relative references of written corrective feedback,aims to investigate effectiveness and efficacy of direct feedback and indirect feedback and students’attitude and preference of feedback.The research questions are as follows:（1）Can written corrective feedback help improve grammar accuracy of learners in the short term?If yes,which type of WCF is more effective?（2）What are the attitude and preference of learners to different types of WCF?To find answers to the research questions,120 senior two students of a middle school in Fuzhou participated in the present study for 18 days.The whole study were divided into two parts,one was four translation tasks,the other one was a questionnaire survey.All participants were separated to four groups.Group 1 were provided with explanation clues（indirect feedback）,which means teacher located errors and explained them on the paper.In Group 2,teacher only underlined errors without any comments（indirect feedback）.For Group 3,errors were corrected by teacher directly（direct feedback）.The last group,only scores were presented on the paper（no feedback）.Some comparisons were made to answer the research questions.Comparing the date of each group in 1^st translation task is to analyze the grammar accuracy level of each group before experiment.Then comparisons of each group in 1^st and 4^th task were made to know the differences after given feedback.Comparisons of group 1,2,3 with group 4 in test 4 were also conducted to figure out which type of feedback is more effective among 3.All data were collected by SPSS,and Independent Sample T-test and Paired Sample T-test were applied to analyze the data.After experiments,a questionnaire survey was conducted to know the attitude and preference of students on written corrective feedback.The result showed that:teacher written corrective feedback is effective;explanation clues is more effective among 4;and most of students recognize its efficacy,some of them prefer explanation clues,some like direct feedback more.The result of study confirms the significance of written corrective feedback in language teaching,which indicates some pedagogical implications for English teaching in China.The implications which were summarized according to the results of present study are as followed:（1）The functions of WCF in English teaching should be paid more attention by both teachers and students,which means the first step is to clarify its efficacy.（2）Teachers should provide feedback consistently and insistently.（3）More close interactions are needed between students and teachers for effective WCF.