Abstract
This quasi-experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest design, investigated the effects of two comprehensive corrective feedback strategies: direct corrective feedback (DCF), and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on L2 learners’ written syntactic accuracy. The participants were 90 Turkish EFL learners. After ensuring their homogeneity in terms of L2 proficiency using Oxford Quick Placement Test, they were assigned to three groups: DCF, ME, and No Feedback (NF). The treatment/control period lasted for five weeks, during which the experimental groups wrote an argumentative essay in class, received the unfocused feedback, and revised their corrected text. The participants in the NF group were provided with feedback only on content, orthography, and organization, but not on grammatical errors. Results of the posttests and delayed-posttests (after a two-week interval) revealed that both experimental groups significantly outperformed the NF group; however, no statistically significant difference was found between the DCF and ME groups. Pedagogical implications are discussed in the paper.
Highlights
Output production is a valuable source for the acquisition of second language (L2) forms because it can promote noticing, which is an essential condition for L2 acquisition (Schmidt, 1990, 1993); through producing output, learners reflect on their metalinguistic knowledge and test hypotheses about their L2 grammar (Swain, 1985, 1995)
Regarding the numerical methods of assessing normality, the values of skewness and kurtosis statistics were within +/-1, based on Phakiti (2010); further, the outcomes of the ratio of skewedness and kurtosis over their respective standard errors were within the ranges of +/-1.96, based on Field (2013); the numerical tests revealed that the data were normally distributed
Some of the early studies did not show promising results for the Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) (e.g., Kepner, 1991; Polio et al, 1998; Semke, 1984), and recently Karim and Nassaji (2018) found that only the participants’ revisions improved significantly after applying the comprehensive WCF, but the accuracy improvements on new writing text, which was found for the direct corrective feedback (DCF) and underlining+metalinguistic comprehensive feedback types were non-significant
Summary
Output production is a valuable source for the acquisition of second language (L2) forms because it can promote noticing, which is an essential condition for L2 acquisition (Schmidt, 1990, 1993); through producing output, learners reflect on their metalinguistic knowledge and test hypotheses about their L2 grammar (Swain, 1985, 1995). In the 2010s, some scholars investigated and compared the effects of different comprehensive WCF methods on improving the accuracy of L2 learners’written texts, including direct vs indirect CF (Karim & Nassaji, 2018; Van Beuningen et al, 2012) as well as DCF and metalinguistic codes, both for grammatical and non-grammatical errors (Bonilla López et al, 2018). Bonilla López et al (2018) indicated that DCF and codes were beneficial for improving learners’ grammatical and non-grammatical accuracy during text revision; a long-term advantage (i.e., 4 weeks after feedback provision) was only found for direct corrections. 5) and the controversial findings of the previous studies, this study investigated the effects of two unfocused WCF strategies: direct corrective feedback (DCF), and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on L2 learners’ written syntactic accuracy (i.e., producing syntactic error-free texts) in the short and long term. 3) Is there any significant difference between the effects of comprehensive DCF and ME on developing learners’ syntactic accuracy in the short and long term?
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