Direct Teacher Corrective Feedback in EFL Writing Class at Tran Quoc Tuan University in Vietnam: To What Extent Students’ Writing Performance Affected

Abstract

The study is aimed at investigating the influence of using teacher’s direct corrective feedback on second-year cadets’ writing performance in a foreign language writing class. It is an action research, employing interviews, writing analysis and survey as research instruments, which was conducted with 3 English teachers and 16 second-year non-English major students of Tran Quoc Tuan University of 2018/2019 academic year. The findings revealed through writing analysis that, firstly, the overall accuracy score tended to increase in the subsequent texts, which partially supports the conclusion that the use of direct corrective feedback (hereafter, DCF) may help the students enhance their writing accuracy over a period of treatment. Secondly, it could be said that DCF could be advantageous for tense, S-V agreement and spelling, but it brought few benefits to the use of articles in the cadets’ writings. Finally, through the survey and interview, most students responded that they got significant progress in their writing after the teacher’s DCF intervention. In addition, the students believed that teacher’s DCF improved their English competence as well as their writing performance.