The Effect of Focused Written Corrective Feedback on EFL Learners’ Acquisition of Articles

• Main Authors: Yu, Chia-lin, 游佳霖
• Other Authors: Cheng, Yuh-show
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39082237604532798230

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 101 === The effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) has long been a controversial issue since Truscott’s (1996) call for abandoning this teaching practice. Early research on WCF also suffered various methodological problems. In the past decade, researchers have used more rigorous research design to understand the effectiveness of WCF, and they generally find that in an ESL instructional setting, focused WCF which is directed only at L2 students’ use of articles (more specifically, a/an for the first-mention usage, and the for the anaphoric usage) can help improve their accuracy of article use. To understand whether this phenomenon would also occur in an EFL instructional setting, this study investigated the effect of focused WCF on Taiwanese college students’ acquisition of articles. But different from previous research, this study expanded the treatment scope to all English articles in noun phrases and adopted a research design of more ecological validity, where the writing tests and tasks were synchronized with the schedule of the course, take-home revisions were involved, and the treatment scope was expanded. Moreover, two other factors, the students’ language analytic ability and their attitudes toward grammatical accuracy in writing, were also included to explore if they would moderate the effect of focused WCF on their short-term and longer-term gains in article use accuracy. The participants came from two high-intermediate level classes in a freshman English course. This study adopted a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design, and all of the participants were required to complete three writing tests, which were designed to probe into their article use accuracy. Between the pretest and the immediate posttest were three treatment tasks, and all participants were required to revise after receiving feedback. While one class served as the experimental group and received focused WCF with metalinguistic explanations on their article use in the treatment tasks, the other class served as the control group and did not receive focused WCF but comments on content, organization, and style in the treatment tasks. The participants’ language analytic ability was measured by a language analysis test, and their attitudes toward grammatical accuracy in writing were gauged by an attitude questionnaire. The results demonstrate that though there was a significant difference between the two groups in the pretest, there were no significant differences between the two groups in the immediate and delayed posttests. Furthermore, the improvement from pretest to delayed posttest reached a marginal significant level for the experimental group but not for the control group. However, the students’ language analytic ability was not found to significantly moderate the effect of focused written CF on their short-term or longer-term gains in article use accuracy, and neither did their attitudes toward grammatical accuracy. The findings of this thesis, on the one hand, suggest the potential difficulty of achieving the positive effect of focused WCF in an ecologically valid research design. On the other hand, the findings offer some implications for English teachers to utilize focused WCF in a more efficient condition and some alternative ways to help students improve their article use.