The Effects of Written Corrective Feedback Types on the Prepositions of Place and Time in EFL Context

Year 2019, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 1 - 13, 28.03.2019

Semih Beşkardeşler Orhan Kocaman

Abstract

Written Corrective Feedback
(WCF) has been a centre of a lively debate among English as a Foreign Language
(EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) researchers and practitioners. For
this motive, the present study sets out to examine the effects of WCF on the
accuracy of the EFL students in second language (L2) writing. For this reason,
a pre-test-post-test-delayed post-test design was used to compare the effects
of direct-focused and direct-unfocused WCF on the accuracy of the prepositions
of place and time: ‘-in, -at, -on and -to’. The students who were in the
focused WCF group received direct correction on the errors related to the
target structure only whereas the unfocused WCF group received direct
correction on all of their errors (grammar, spelling and punctuation) including
the target structure errors. In the post-test and delayed post-test, both
experimental groups outperformed the control group, which received no
correction. Between the focused WCF and unfocused WCF groups, on the other
hand, no statistically significant difference was found in the short and long
term. Thus, it was concluded that WCF, focused or unfocused, was helpful for
the students to use the target structure more accurately. 

Keywords

Written corrective feedback, focused and unfocused written corrective feedback, error treatment, the prepositions of place and time, L2 writing

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