The Effects Of Task Repetition With Written Corrective Feedback On Senior High School Students’ Writing Performance

In recent years,task repetition,as one of the important variables in task implementation,has attracted an explosion of interest from foreign language teaching researchers.Task repetition involves asking language learners to repeat the exact identical task or the slightly altered task with an interval of a certain time.Results of abundant studies have confirmed that task repetition could direct learners’ attention to linguistic forms when performing meaningful tasks,and effectively facilitate complexity,accuracy and fluency of learners’ language output.At present,research on task repetition mainly focuses on its direct impact on learners’ oral or written language output.However,when it comes to classroom language teaching practice,the compounding effects of task repetition with other commonly employed instructional techniques,such as written corrective feedback,remains unexplored.The present experimental study was designed to examine the mediating effects of direct written corrective feedback and indirect written corrective feedback on learners’ writing development when performing repeating tasks.42 senior high school students at the same level of English proficiency participated the research.They were randomly assigned to three groups,namely,task repetition with direct written corrective feedback,task repetition with indirect written corrective feedback and task repetition with no feedback.All the participants were required to complete the placement test,three narrative written tasks and a questionnaire in four weeks.After completing the main task,participants in the experimental groups were given direct and indirect written corrective feedback correspondingly.For the next two weeks,all participants were required to complete the exact repeating task and procedural repeating task.The writing outputs were analyzed from three dimensions in terms of complexity,accuracy and fluency.The results of the experimental study revealed that:(1)Both task repetition with direct written corrective feedback and task repetition with indirect written corrective feedback promoted complexity of learners’ writing performance.However,the positive effects of task repetition with written corrective feedback did not transfer to the new task with same procedure.(2)Both task repetition with direct written corrective feedback and task repetition with indirect written corrective feedback had enhanced the participants’ writing accuracy,but there were no significant mediating effects of direct and indirect written corrective feedback in exact repeating task.Besides,learners in the indirect written corrective feedback could transfer their enhanced accuracy to the subsequent new task with same type.(3)No significant mediating effects of task repetition with direct and indirect written corrective feedback were found on participants’ writing fluency.The written output from the group of task repetition with direct written corrective feedback in general outperformed that of the group of the task repetition with indirect written corrective feedback and that of the group of task repetition without any feedback.On the basis of the research findings stated above,the current study proved that task repetition with written corrective feedback facilitates high school students’ writing production in different dimensions.In spite of some limitations and shortcomings,the findings of the current study may provide meaningful implications for teachers to implement tasks and offer written corrective feedback to senior high school students in proper ways.