Thai Students’ Perceptions on the Direct Vs. Indirect Written Corrective Feedback: A Thai University Context

Abstract

Feedback is an important skill and a valuable part of any language course. The term feedback has been used by various scholars to refer to both negative as well as positive error treatment in both natural settings and the instructional setting. Some researchers have raised objections to corrective use and have pointed out that it is unhelpful or even harmful for students' writing development. Yet others seem to have established evidence in support of corrective feedback. Nevertheless, very few studies have conducted an experiment on the effectiveness in terms of accuracy on business letter writing. This quasi-experimental study involving 63 senior students in two sections of business English classroom at an international university in Thailand were divided into two groups. Each group received one type of feedback. The group that received direct corrective feedback perceived it positively hence they showed better improvement when compared to the group that received indirect corrective feedback which was negatively perceived. Further investigation on different writing types and different native language (L1) background would contribute more to the field's literature as more debate on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback will still need further research to address many unanswered questions.

Roles of Feedback to English Writing Improvement: Thai EFL Novice Writers in Higher Education

“…On the other hand, teacher feedback, particularly circling and/or underlining written errors without any teacher's commentary was their less preference in their writing drafts. This has misled students into wrong and ambiguous ideas of generating their paragraph in English similar to Hosseiny's (2014) and Tangkiengsirisin & Kalra's (2016) findings showing that the indirect feedback made them confused when the teacher only circled or underlined their writing errors. Students no longer had any opportunities to enhance writing skills because they did not receive proper feedback at the beginning stage of writing.…”

“…Writing has been one of the most prominent English language skills in ESL/EFL classrooms (Ahmadi, Maftoon & Mehrdad, 2012;Fareed, Ashraf & Bilal, 2016). English writing obviously appears to be a crucial mediation to convey opinions and thoughts in literate communities and across the globe (Tangkiengsirisin & Kalra, 2016). Nonetheless, foreign language learners found that writing in English is much more difficult than other English skills (Phuket & Othman, 2015) since a good paragraph primarily needs a topic sentence, supporting ideas, and conclusion (Wirantaka, 2016).…”

“…Moreover, Tangkiengsirisin & Kalra's (2016) study traced the perceptions of direct and indirect written corrective feedback in Thai university context. Two types of feedback were provided on four different business letter writing assignments: persuasive, informative, negative, and positive letter writing.…”

“…Moreover, they truly exposed that teacher's explanation broadened how to write up English sentences and employed transitions more accurately and appropriately. Tangkiengsirisin and Kalra (2016) assured that providing direct corrective feedback promoted positive outcomes on the grammatical accuracy of students' writing assignments. Explicit feedback was students' preference over time due to the fact that they simply imitated and copied teacher's suggestions into their later draft (Ferris, 2006).…”

Thirty-Two Years of Corrective Feedback in Language Teaching and Learning: A Review of the Literature

“…The results also suggested that language teachers have to consider individual learner differences. Similarly, Tangkiengsirisin and Kalra (2016) studied the perfections of Thai learners towards direct and indirect WCF. The results showed that the group which received direct CF improved significantly compared to the group which received indirect CF.…”