An Empirical Study Of The Influences Of Direct Feedback And Indirect Feedback On The Accuracy Of Articles In English Writing Of Junior High School Students

Writing,especially for Chinese EFL learners,is considered as a very difficult skill to master.Also,as there has no function words articles in Chinese language,mastering English articles is a difficult task for Chinese EFL learners.Therefore,it is not uncommon that Chinese learners often make kinds of errors in English writing,especially in the misuse of articles.Although a large number of studies both at home and abroad have shown that teacher feedback can effectively improve the accuracy rate of articles in English writing.Many studies have yielded the opposite results.In addition.most of the studies on this topic are aimed at subjects with advanced English proficiency.Therefore,the findings of most previous researches are not universal and may not be applied to the primary and secondary school teaching in Chinese context.This study aims to explore the effects of direct and indirect feedback by taking English articles as the target grammatical structure and junior high school students as the subjects.The study lasts for eight weeks with five writing tasks arranged,consisting of a pre-test,two-week’s intervention,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test.94 Junior 2 school students from two parallel classes of Wuhan Liangdaojie Middle School participant in the study and are divided into two groups according to their classes,which are direct feedback group and indirect feedback group.The researcher needs to provide students with different feedback types based on their groups in the first three writing tasks.Also,Independent-Samples T Test and Paired-Samples T Test are mainly employed to examine the differences between the two groups before and after the experiment and the differences of each group before and after the experiment.The major findings of the study are listed as follows.Firstly,both direct feedback and indirect feedback are effective in improving the accuracy rate of articles in students’English writing.Secondly,compared with indirect feedback,direct feedback has a more significant effect in improving students’ article accuracy in the immediate post-test.Thirdly,neither direct feedback nor indirect feedback has a lasting effect in reducing students’ article errors in English writing in the delayed post-test.In short,the study provides empirical evidence about the effectiveness of direct feedback and indirect feedback in improving the article accuracy in students’English writing.Meanwhile,some pedagogical implications on the teaching and learning of English articles in Chinese context are also presented.