Abstract
The current study is designed to find the comparative effects of direct feedback method and indirect feedback method of error treatment on Urdu EFL learners’ writings at intermediate level. To find out the comparative results about these two treatment methods, 46 students having Urdu as their mother tongue were divided into two groups. Errors in writings of one group were treated by direct feedback method while indirect feedback method was adopted to treat the errors of the other group. Repeated measure experimental research design was used to find the accuracy in students’ writings. The study revealed that both methods helped the students to decrease the errors and created accuracy over the time but direct feedback method yielded better results in comparison to indirect feedback group. Comparative effects of two methods on error categories showed that for verb errors, article errors and sentence structure errors direct feedback method was more helpful. While for noun ending errors, wrong word errors, indirect feedback method of error treatment was more useful. Key words: Comparative study, effectiveness, feedback, EFL learners, writings.
Highlights
Second language is always learned due to some political, economic, social or educational purposes proficiency in Second language is of great importance
The study results reveal that accuracy of students in direct feedback group increased over the time and students’ errors were gradually decreased
This significant decrease in total errors and average errors as described by the data proves that direct feedback method is helpful to reduce the errors in Urdu EFL students’ writings
Summary
Second language is always learned due to some political, economic, social or educational purposes proficiency in Second language is of great importance. Feedback by teacher plays an important role in a language learning process. For giving response to learner’s error, different terms are being used These are ‘feedback’, ‘repair’, ‘error correction’, ‘error treatment’ ‘negative feedback’ and ‘negative evidence’. According to Chaudron (1988) feedback is “various types of classroom interactions” used by the teachers to response the learners’ errors. He adopts the term ‘error treatment’ and describes it as “any teacher behaviour following an error that minimally attempts to inform the learner of the fact of error” For whole process of error treatment, Hendrickson’s (1980) in his article used the only term error correction
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