Effects Of Written Corrective Feedback On High School Students’ Acquisition Of Past Hypothetical Conditional

Corrective feedback(CF)has been a major theme in second language acquisition(SLA)research.And a large body of research shows that oral and written corrective feedback(OCF and WCF respectively)have positive effects on second language acquisition.However,there are few studies on the effects of CF on high school students’ acquisition of grammatical structures,especially through WCF to improve the accuracy of grammatical structures.Therefore,this study extends in-depth investigation on the effects of direct WCF and indirect WCF on high school students’ acquisition of past hypothetical conditional;besides,this study also examines the effects of direct WCF and indirect WCF on high school students of different language proficiency.Based on the noticing hypothesis,the comprehensible output hypothesis and the interaction hypothesis,this experiment adopted the design of five sessions: pretest,two treatments,immediate post-test and delayed post-test.The whole experiment lasted 5 weeks.The study selected two classes in Grade 11 from Wuwei No.2 high school in Wuwei,Gansu Province.The participants were randomly divided into the direct WCF group,the indirect WCF group,and the control group.Furthermore,each group was divided into two language proficiency levels according to their test scores.The direct WCF group received the correct grammatical structure of past hypothetical conditional.The indirect WCF group did not receive the correct grammatical structure of past hypothetical conditional,but the teacher need to underline their errors using the red pen.The control group did not receive any corrective feedback,but given the corresponding score.Participants were asked to complete five writing tasks and three grammaticality judgment tests.The major findings are illustrated as follows:Firstly,the direct WCF and indirect WCF groups perform better than the control group.Compared with indirect WCF,the effect of direct WCF is more significant,which means that both direct WCF and indirect WCF enable high school students to improve the accuracy of past hypothetical conditional.Secondly,the effects of WCF differ to students of different language proficiency.The results reveal that direct WCF and indirect WCF have positive effects on high-level students,but for low-level students,direct WCF is more helpful for them.From the above results,this study finds that direct and indirect WCF have significance on improving the accuracy of grammatical structures,which enriches the relative research on WCF.Meanwhile,this study suggests that teachers are supposed to provide the appropriate types of WCF according to the different grammatical structures in order to assistant learners to study effectively.What’s more,teachers should pay more attention to learner’s individual difference.