The Effect of Scaffolded Corrective Feedback on EFL Learners’ Accurate Use of Articles and Past Tenses in Writing

Year 2015, Volume: 36 Issue: 3, 1982 - 1990, 13.05.2015

Ali Amirghassemi

Abstract

Abstract. There is still debate on what kind of corrective feedback is more effective in improving L2 student writers’ written accuracy. Inspired by the Vygotskian Sociocultural theory, which regards scaffolding as the optimal way of promoting learning, the present study set out to investigate whether ‘scaffolded feedback’ could work better than the orthodox reformulation of students’ errors in enhancing their writing ability. To this end, a quasi- experimental study was conducted to compare the performance of two groups of Iranian EFL students (Scaffolded CF group and Reformulation group) on English articles and past tenses in narrative writing tasks across a pretest, first posttest and second posttest. For the Scaffolded CF group, the teacher provided corrective feedback in a graduated and stepwise fashion from implicit to explicit, trying to push them towards identifying and correcting their errors. The students in the Reformulation group simply received the correct form of their errors. The results revealed that the efficacy of CF is much reliant on the type of error to be corrected. Whereas no significant difference was found between the two groups in using articles, the Scaffolded CF group significantly outperformed the Reformulation group in using past tenses. Implicit in this finding is that, for certain categories, providing extensive feedback may hardly take any effect and simpler feedback types will suffice.

Keywords

Scaffolded feedback, Reformulation, Written accuracy, Pushed output

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