Corrective Written Feedback in L2 Writing: The Impact of Direct Written Feedback

Authors : Rabia Bayram

Pages : 4-11

View : 18 | Download : 10

Publication Date : 2016-11-24

Article Type : Research

Abstract :This study investigates the impact of direct corrective written feedback on EFL learners writing accuracy and to see on which language component it is more effective in terms of decreasing the number of errors. Two research questions are generated. The first research question seeks to answer which type of errors show decrease when direct corrective feedback is provided: grammar or vocabulary. The second research question is shaped according to the first research question and it aims to find out which grammar category shows decline in terms of number of errors in their first and second drafts. As being both the researcher and the teacher in this study, the treatment is provided by me. The students have received direct corrective feedback on their first drafts and they are asked to rewrite and prepare a second draft afterwards. The sample is chosen according to convenient sampling and the procedure lasted for four weeks. Treatment is given through four weeks of direct corrective written feedback to 13 EFL students. Their first and second drafts are analyzed, the number of errors is counted and the types of errors they made are identified. The results are in accordance with the hypotheses which are generated at the beginning of this paper. Grammar errors show the highest decrease as number of errors than the number of vocabulary errors. As for the second research question, which asks for which grammar component shows the highest decline when direct corrective feedback is provided, it is found out that the number of errors in subject-verb agreement and determiners has been diminished in their second drafts. There are some major limitations in this study. The first one is the number of the participants and the sampling. There are generalizability issues in this study since there are only 13 participants and they are not selected randomly. Second one is the duration of the study. Although I provided feedback only for 4 weeks and that is not enough to come up with a generalization, the study still gives insights about the effectiveness of direct corrective feedback on EFL writing accuracy.
Keywords : feedback