A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Focused And Comprehensive Written Corrective Feedback To Students’ Grammatical Accuracy In Writing

Providing written corrective feedback(WCF)in response to students’ writing is a well-entrenched teaching strategy.With conventional feedback methods we see teachers correct almost all errors in students’ writing and leave their compositions full of red marks.Comprehensive written corrective feedback is fraught with problems.Focused written corrective feedback is a viable option for responding to student writing.However,how about their effectiveness on students’ writing accuracy? In the numerous studies on WCF,few compared the effects of FWCF(focused written corrective feedback)and CWCF(comprehensive written corrective feedback).The results are inconsistent even among these few studies.So this study was conducted to explore whether there are any different effects of FWCF and CWCF on students’ grammatical accuracy in English writing.110 students in Grade 2 from two intact classes in Wuwei No.6 Middle School were chosen to be the subjects.One class was randomly arranged to be FWCF group and the other one to be CWCF group.At the beginning of the experiment,there was a pre-test for all the subjects.Then students’ 10 most problematic error types(articles,sentence structures,word forms,nouns,prepositions,subject-verb agreement,verb tenses,non-finite verbs,conjunctions and pronouns)were chosen to be the target error types of this study.The experiment lasted for about 4 months,and during which each student wrote 6 compositions.Students in FWCF group got feedback focusing on 2-5 error types for each composition and different error types were treated every four weeks.Students in CWCF group received feedback treating all errors(including the 10 target error types)for each composition.In week13,students finished their post-test compositions.And a month later(at the beginning of the next semester),the delayed post-test was conducted.Besides,in week 13,right after students finished the revision of the sixth composition,all of them were asked to write a reflective journal.Students’ reflective journals were collected and analyzed to provide triangulation of data.Then the data was analyzed by SPSS 26.0.In order to answer the research questions in this study,the researcher used independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test to show the results.For the first research question: What are the different effects of FWCF and CWCF on students’ grammatical accuracy in writing? The result is that there were no significantly different effects of FWCF and CWCF on students’ grammatical accuracy when the two whole classes were compared.For the second research question: What are the different effects of FWCF and CWCF on different proficiency students’ grammatical accuracy in writing? The answer is that CWCF is more effective to high proficiency students while FWCF is more effective to low proficiency students.The results were supported by students’ reflective journals.Although there are a number of limitations,this study provides some pedagogical implications for English teachers.For example,teachers are encouraged to differentiate their instructional techniques and feedback approaches according to students’ proficiency levels.Suggestions for future studies are also given,such as choosing junior middle school students as the subjects and using individualized error types.