The Effect of Focused and Unfocused Direct Written Corrective Feedback on a New Piece of Writing

Abstract

The value of written corrective feedback (CF) has been an issue of considerable debate in the literature (e.g. Truscott, 1996; Ferris, 1999), and this polemic has lead to a trend in recent studies to draw on second language acquisition (SLA) research as a way to further comprehend the intricacies of this complex issue. Indeed, Ellis, Sheen Murakami and Takashima (2008) delineate between focused CF and unfocused CF. For direct CF, they found that both types of focuses were effective in new pieces of writing, and that this effect was durable. As only this one study has examined these focuses for the target form of articles, arguably further research is needed with different target forms. With this in mind, the study presented here contrasted the effectiveness of focused direct CF for past tense forms, unfocused direct CF and a control group (no CF) on the accuracy of student writing. Using mixed between-within ANOVAs, it was revealed that all three conditions improved in accuracy between two writing tasks; however, both the focused direct CF and unfocused direct CF groups significantly outperformed the control group in the second piece of writing.