The Effects Of Focused And Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback On Language Accuracy Of Students’ English Writing In A Junior High School In Shenzhen

In recent years,writing has become more and more important in senior high school entrance examination,but students generally find it difficult to improve.Teachers often correct students’ errors in the teaching of English writing.Written corrective feedback has also been a hot topic in second language acquisition.A growing number of empirical studies are examining whether written corrective feedback is effective,and which kind of corrective feedback is more effective.The author of this paper conducted an empirical study about written corrective feedback in order to find out what effects written corrective feedback has on the language accuracy in the subjects’ English writing and whether there is any difference in the effect of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback on the subjects’ accurate use of the target structure.In this experiment,91 students from three classes of Grade 8 in a middle school in Bao’an District Shenzhen were selected as the experimental subjects.First,the past simple tense was selected as the target structure after analyzing the students’ error categories in the pretest.Second,according to the results of the pre-test,the classes were divided into a focused class(31 students),an unfocused feedback class(32 students)and a control class(28students).Focused written corrective feedback was given to the focused class,that is,only correcting errors of the simple past tense,while the unfocused class received unfocused written corrective feedback,so all grammatical errors were corrected.And no written corrective feedback was given to the control class.The experiment lasted eight weeks,with three tests and three treatment sessions.The three tests included one pre-test,one immediate post-test and one delayed post-test.The three treatment sessions were conducted once a week and students were asked to complete a narrative writing in tests and treatment sessions.After the writings were collected,the author gave different feedback to different classes.After three treatment sessions,the students received an immediate post-test and three weeks later,a delayed post-test.Finally,the author calculated students’ accuracy rate of the simple past tense in the two post-tests and made quantitative analysis of the data by using the Statistical Product and Service Solutions(SPSS,version 25.0).The following statistical methods were employed,paired sample T test and one-way ANOVA.After statistical analysis of the data obtained from the experiment,the following conclusions were reached:1)The accuracy scores of the focused class and unfocused class improved significantly,while there was no significant improvement in the control class.2)Although the focused class and unfocused class both improved their accuracy scores of the target structure,the focused class improved more significantly than the unfocused class and the effect was more durable.Based on the above research results,some pedagogical suggestions were proposed on the teaching of English writing.English teachers should give written corrective feedback to students’ compositions in time to help students improve language accuracy.In addition,English teachers can select one or two target structure(s),and give focused written corrective feedback to improve students’ language accuracy and help students achieve more lasting results in language learning.