Assessing the effect of focused direct and focused indirect written corrective feedback on explicit and implicit knowledge of language learners

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of teacher's written corrective feedback (WCF) on acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of simple past tense by language learners. Eighty-seven Iranian beginner learners of English participated in this study. The participants were randomly assigned to three groups: focused direct WCF, focused indirect WCF, and control groups. The participants completed text summary tasks. They also took placement test, pretest narrative writing task, text summary tasks, pretest and posttest untimed grammaticality judgment test, metalinguistic test, and timed grammaticality judgment test. The results of the data analysis showed the positive effect of WCF on acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of simple past tense by Iranian beginner learners of English in an English as a foreign language classroom context. However, the findings of the study should be interpreted cautiously due to different factors involved in explicit and implicit acquisition of a structure and also the nature of a structure and its difficulty and complexity. The findings of the study are discussed in detail and future venues for research are suggested.

Assessing the effect of giving and receiving written corrective feedback on improving L2 writing accuracy: does giving and receiving feedback have fair mutual benefit?

“…Yet, there is still no conclusive evidence concerning the efficacy of specific feedback strategies in improving second language (L2) learners' writing accuracy. L2 researchers, to date, have investigated the effect of feedback on L2 learners' writing ability from different perspectives, including focused and unfocused feedback (e.g., Bitchener & Knoch, 2009;Nemati, Alavi, & Mohebbi, 2019), direct and indirect feedback (Karim & Endley, 2019;Kim & Bowles, 2019), the feedback medium (Zhang, 2020), L2 learners and teachers' perceptions, preferences, needs, and practices in writing tasks (Bahrouni & Tuzlukova, 2019;Motallebzadeh, Kondori, & Kazemi, 2020;Nemati, Alavi, Mohebbi, & Masjedlou, 2017;Raza, 2019), and the source of feedback, namely teacher and/or peer (Ferris, 1995;Hyland, 2000;Miao, Badger, & Zhen, 2006;Peterson & Portier, 2014;Zhang & McEneaney, 2020). These studies and their inconclusive and somehow contradictory findings have given rise to a great deal of discussion on the value of feedback in developing writing accuracy.…”

Comparing Pakistani EFL Learners’ Beliefs about Written Constructive Feedback and their Impact on L2 Writing Accuracy

“…But, the research studies on written CF that have to examine these constructs to some extent, are still very limited. These investigations (e.g., Bitchener & Knoch, 2012;Rummel, 2014;Saeed, 2015;Nemati, Alavi, & Mohebbi, 2019), as discussed in literature review, particularly probed the processing of the written CF on learners' uptake and noticing during text revisions by focusing certain linguistic features without taking into consideration the students' beliefs towards written CF. This is problematic for the students to improve writing accuracy with being investigated what type of written CF they believe to be useful for them.…”

Drawing on Readerly Intuition in Sentence Level Feedback

“…Alternatively, indirect corrective feedback identifies errors, but does not offer any correction or explanation of the error: it is up to the students to figure out what is wrong with their writing and fix it. This approach to corrective feedback is also problematic because it can put too much onus on students to figure out what went wrong, which is particularly problematic for new language learners (Nemati, Alavi, & Mohebbi, 2019).…”