Effects of Writing Anxiety and Grammatical Complexity on Raising L2 Written Accuracy through Corrective Feedback

Abstract

The study examined whether second language (L2) learners’ writing anxiety and complexity of target structure, separately and interactionally, influence the effect of the teacher’s written corrective feedback (CF) on L2 written accuracy. One hundred forty-seven EFL learners formed eight groups distinguished by anxiety level (high and low), target structure (articles and hypothetical conditional as less and more complex), and CF reception (whether to receive CF). They performed four writing tasks and their first, third, and fourth writings constituted a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest, respectively. The results suggested that the two factors had interactional as well as separate effects. For articles, written CF had positive short-term effects regardless of learners’ anxiety level but the effects were sustained over time only for low anxiety learners. For hypothetical conditional, written CF had greater short-term benefits on low anxiety learners, but its long-term benefits were equal across anxiety levels.