Abstract
Writing is regarded as a crucial skill in English language curricula at the secondary and tertiary levels in the Chinese education system. Currently, Chinese teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) often adopt a product approach to teaching EFL writing, in which they emphasize the quality of their students’ written products and show little concern with the writing process. To help L2 learners achieve sustainable development of their writing proficiency, teachers employ a comprehensive approach to correct their students’ language errors as a common practice. However, empirical studies regarding its efficacy on different dimensions of L2 writing are insufficient. This study intended to fill this lacuna in a Chinese EFL context, which investigated the effects of sustained comprehensive written corrective feedback (WCF) on accuracy, complexity, fluency, and content and organization quality of EFL students’ writing. Quasi-experimental in design, it involved a comparison group and a treatment group receiving four sessions of direct comprehensive WCF. Results show that such WCF contributed to writing accuracy and fluency over time. Our textual analysis further reveals that it particularly benefited students’ grammatical accuracy, reducing some rule-based grammatical error types. However, it showed limited effects on complexity, content, or organization of students’ writing. Interestingly, the comparison group did not improve any dimensions of their writing. Possible implications are also discussed.
Highlights
Published: 22 July 2021As an indispensable practice in writing instruction to sustain L2 learners’ writing performance, feedback is widely utilized by L2 writing teachers to inform students of their writing problems and weaknesses so that students can improve their writing performance in both local and global aspects [1,2,3]
The tests showed that there were no significant differences with respect to the various indexes at the time of the pretest: Mean length of T-units, p = 0.333; ratio of clauses per T-unit, p = 0.103; lexical density, p = 0.997; mean segmental type-token ratio, p = 0.088; errors per 100 words, p = 0.970; fluency, p = 0.475; content, p = 0.721; organization, p = 0.693
Apart from the examination of the effects on general writing accuracy, we explored an important question in L2 writing research and instruction: Which error types benefit from comprehensive written corrective feedback (WCF)? In terms of the broad categories, one-way repeated measures ANOVAs showed that such WCF had few effects on Chinese
Summary
Published: 22 July 2021As an indispensable practice in writing instruction to sustain L2 learners’ writing performance, feedback is widely utilized by L2 writing teachers to inform students of their writing problems and weaknesses so that students can improve their writing performance in both local (language) and global (content and organization) aspects [1,2,3]. What invariably happens in L2 writing classrooms is that teachers spare no effort to provide students with feedback on a variety of errors, errors in language use (i.e., written corrective feedback, or WCF for short) [4,5,6]. A number of researchers refuted his claim, documenting that WCF can contribute to L2 writing accuracy in both revised and new texts [10,11,12,13,14,15]. Such a controversy reflects the complexity of WCF in the sphere of L2 writing. Some researchers have advocated that a focused (selective) feedback approach is supposed to be adopted
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