| As an expressive skill,writing can reflect students’ comprehensive linguistic competence.Mastering writing is of great significance for students to improve their English proficiency.Ellis(2008)classified written corrective feedback into direct and indirect feedback depending on whether the teacher provides the correct answers to students’ errors in their writing.Both types of feedback have been shown to facilitate students’ writing.Previous studies on written corrective feedback mainly focused on students’ writing accuracy and the comparison of the effects of different types of written corrective feedback,while few scholars considered the intrinsic factors of learners.Learning engagement refers to the degree of students’ active participation in learning activities and is an important predictor of academic achievement.It includes three dimensions: behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement and affective engagement.Previous studies on learning engagement mainly focused on college students.Therefore,the current study aims to explore the effects of direct and indirect written corrective feedback on junior high school students’ learning engagement in English writing,and compares the effects of the two types of feedback on students with different language levels.Based on the Noticing Hypothesis,the Interaction Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis,this study attempts to address the following two research questions:(1)What are the differences in the effects of direct and indirect written corrective feedback on junior high school students’ learning engagement(behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement and affective engagement)in English writing?(2)For students with different language levels,what are the differences in the effects of direct and indirect written corrective feedback on their learning engagement(behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement and affective engagement)in English writing?The participants of this study are Grade 8 students from a junior high school in Guangzhou.90 students from two parallel classes are divided into a direct written corrective feedback group and an indirect written corrective feedback group,each group consisting of 45 students.Based on the results of the writing pre-test and the final exam scores of the previous semester,students with different language levels are classified.There are 12 high-level students and 12 low-level students in each group.A writing test and a questionnaire are adopted as research instruments in this study,and the duration of the experiment is eight weeks.The major findings are as follows:(1)Both direct and indirect written corrective feedback can positively influence students’ learning engagement in English writing,but no significant difference can be found between them.Indirect written corrective feedback is better than direct written corrective feedback in terms of behavioral and cognitive engagement,while direct written corrective feedback has a more prominent effect on students’ affective engagement.(2)Both direct and indirect written corrective feedback can make significant improvements in the learning engagement of high-level and low-level students,but the influence varies in different dimensions.Compared with indirect written corrective feedback,direct written corrective feedback can significantly facilitate low-level students’ learning engagement and its three dimensions,and the positive effect on affective engagement is the most obvious.Indirect written corrective feedback can significantly promote the learning engagement,behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement of high-level students than direct written corrective feedback,but there is no significant difference between the effects of the two kinds of feedback on their affective engagement.The study suggests that teachers need to flexibly combine different types of written corrective feedback according to students’ language proficiency to help them improve their English writing levels. |
