The Effect of Error Correction on Taiwanese EFL Students’ Writing Accuracy

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the effect of teacher’s error correction feedback on EFL students’ ability to correct their own writing errors for better accuracy. It intends to find out whether the instructor’s explicit error feedback followed by students’ extensive revisions, has any effect on students’ ability in revising their errors with their own writing pieces. A group of nineteen EFL Taiwanese college students, with low to intermediate English level proficiency, participated in this study. The results indicated that the effect of teachers’ error feedback on students’ ability to self-correct was not significant. Most of the errors, after given extensive feedback and revision, were not significantly revised after a three-month interval. The result of this case study tends to support the claim that teachers’ error feedback does not help much with EFL students improving their writing accuracy. Other findings regarding students’ interpretation towards their writing errors and unsatisfactory self-correction results and teacher’s perspective and observation are discussed.