Examining the effects of comprehensive written corrective feedback on L2 EAP students’ linguistic performance: A mixed-methods study

Abstract

Much research has been conducted on the effects of written corrective feedback (WCF) in L2 studies. Unfortunately, the effects of comprehensive WCF in Chinese EAP contexts have been insufficiently documented. Given the significance of WCF in developing EFL students' EAP skills, we employed a mixed-methods approach to bridge this gap. Adopting a quasi-experimental design, this study was implemented in two intact university English classes, with a treatment group receiving four rounds of comprehensive WCF, while no feedback was offered to a comparison group. The posttest and delayed posttest results revealed that such WCF helped the treatment group improve their writing accuracy and fluency statistically significantly and retain the positive effects in the delayed posttest, while it did not enhance their syntactic complexity. The comparison group did not statistically significantly improve their writing accuracy, syntactic complexity, or fluency. To elicit participants’ perceptions of comprehensive WCF effects on their linguistic performance, we administered a follow-up open-ended questionnaire with all the treatment-group participants after the posttest. The qualitative findings generally echoed and shed light on the quantitative results. We conclude our study with a discussion of its implications.