Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
With the trend of global diversification and the rapid development of information exchange, English writing, as one of the important means of human communication, has attracted more and more attention from teachers and scholars at home and abroad. Swain (1985, p. 235) emphasizes the status of writing as “an advanced cognitive activity as well as an embodiment of logic ability and language use”. English writing, as one of the five basic functions of listening, speaking, reading, writing and viewing, is a comprehensive response to the other four aspects. It can effectively promote the internalization of knowledge. Whether students can apply their English knowledge and skills to communicate can be fully reflected in English writing. Furthermore, according to New English Curriculum Standards, it stresses the importance of thinking and expression in English, which fails to achieve in practical teaching, even English writing is regarded as the weakest and most difficult part. Numerous teachers and scholars are dedicated to exploring the way of guiding students to write, but the results are minimal.
In the 1970s, with the emergence of the Process Approach in language teaching, feedback, as its characteristic and core, plays an important role in the cultivation of second language writing skills, and it becomes the focus of numerous researches. Ashwell (2000) stresses the importance of feedback as feedback plays a central and key role in the writing process in which it permeates and shapes it.
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1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Study
Discussing the influence of direct and indirect WCF on the accuracy of English writing, this research can not only enrich the theoretical system of CF but also contribute to the empirical research of it.
First of all, this research has important theoretical significance. Although there are numerous studies have confirmed that WCF has a positive effect on the improvement of learner’s English writing, there are still a group of scholars who argue that WCF hasn’t a positive effect on the improvement of English writing, even they assert that it is detrimental. The conclusion on whether WCF is effective or not proved to be inconclusive and the topic is still under controversy. Even the scholars who support the WCF have a dispute about which is more effective between DWCF and IWCF. Dispute on this issue also requires more empirical research and in-depth investigation. This paper examines the effectiveness of DWCF and IWCF. To some extent, it can provide a new basis for Truscott and Ferris's century debate on whether CF is effective.
Besides, although related research about the impact of WCF on English writing abroad has achieved certain results, it is not feasible to apply these results to Chinese writing teaching. The main reason lies in that English is regarded as a second language abroad, while in China, English is treated as a foreign language. The former is widely adopted in daily life, which is conducive to the development of language ability, while the latter is only accessible in English courses. Therefore, it is necessary to study DWCF and IWCF in China so as to provide theoretical support for teachers' error correction strategies in Chinese English writing teaching.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Relevant Definition of WCF
2.1.1 Feedback
The concept of Feedback is derived from cybernetics, which generally refers to the “return” of what is emitted to the starting point and has an impact at the same time. In second language acquisition, Feedback is a response to errors of learners’ language, which indicates that some mistakes are appearing in learners’ language and it also gives correct expressions or provides meta-knowledge information for errors (Zhang Sumin, 2011). To a certain extent, students' interest in learning can be stimulated by effective feedback so that the classroom teaching effect can be improved
With the introduction of the Process Writing Approach in writing teaching in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the feedback has gradually become a hot topic in the study of second language writing. According to Guth (1989), four phases are included in the process of writing, which are pre-writing, drafting, feedback and revision. Wang Yin (2012) maintains that in the Process Writing Approach, the feedback runs through the writing, and the guidance of the teacher or peers permeates every part of the writing. Feedback in the process of writing enables students to constantly discover their own deficiencies or errors and get input and inspiration, which is conducive to improving writing quality and skills.
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2.2 Classification of WCF
WCF can be further divided into different types due to the different measure materials. According to Ellis (2009), there are six varieties of WCF which respectively are DWCF, IWCF, metalinguistic CF, focused WCF & unfocused WCF, electronic feedback and reformulation. When it comes to the form of providing WCF, it can be divided into DWCF and IWCF. When putting the focus of feedback into consideration, it falls into focused WCF & unfocused WCF. And in the present study, it mainly deals with DWCF and IWCF, focused WCF and unfocused WCF. Other sorts of WCF will not be further discussed here.
2.2.1 DWCF and IWCF
In terms of the form of providing feedback, WCF can be split into DWCF and IWCF. As Bitchener (2008) indicates, DWCF refers to the teacher directly modifying the errors of the student’s composition and at the same time, providing the correct language form for the errors. Various correct forms can be employed in DWCF. According to Ellis (2009), he puts forward three types of direct corrective forms, which can be list as follows: crossing out the words, morphemes, superfluous phrases, making an insertion of the words, phrases, morphemes which are missing, and writing down the corrective forms of the errors nearby whether above or below the errors. The following figure gives an illustration of what the direct corrective feedback in this paper is (Figure 2.1).
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Chapter Three Research Methodology ............................... 21
3.1 Research Questions .................................. 21
3.2 Research Participants ............................... 21
Chapter Four Results and Discussion ................................. 29
4.1 Effects of Direct and Indirect WCF on the Overall Language Accuracy of English Writing ........................................ 29
4.1.1 Pre-test of the Students’ Overall Writing Accuracy between Two Groups............................................. 30
4.1.2 Effects of DWCF on Overall Writing Accuracy ................................ 31
Chapter Five Conclusion............................... 50
5.1 Major Findings ....................................... 50
5.2 Pedagogical Implications ............................... 51
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 Effects of Direct and Indirect WCF on the Overall Language Accuracy of English Writing
Statistical analysis software (SPSS 23.0) is adopted in this section in response to the results of the test. Through the Independent Samples T-test, the author does a comparative analysis in pre-test on the error rate per hundred words to verify that both group 1 and group 2 are comparable in response to the language writing accuracy. And then Paired Samples T-test is conducted in response to the first and second questions. The first research question concerns the effects of DWCF and IWCF on the language accuracy of Senior Two students English writing. That’s to say, we need to testify whether the direct and indirect WCF can enhance the writing accuracy or not. Therefore, we must make a comparison between pre-test and post-test based on the students’ writing accuracy in different groups.
4.1.1 Pre-test of the Students’ Overall Writing Accuracy Between Two Groups
However, before we carried out the experiment, we must make a comparative analysis to test whether the accuracy of the group 1 and group 2 is comparable in order to decline the influence of unrelated variables and increase the reliability of the results based on the experiment. Therefore, in this section, the author firstly approaches the Independent Sample T-test which can be presented as follows:
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Chapter Five Conclusion
5.1 Major Findings
On the basis of the analysis and discussion mentioned above, the present study obtains the following major conclusions after the three-month experiment.
To begin with, both DWCF and IWCF are instrumental to the enhancement of language accuracy of English writing for senior 2 students, and in terms of the extent of the improvement on language accuracy between these two correcting methods, there is no significant difference.
Besides, this study finds that DWCF is helpful to improve the accuracy of verbs, wrong words, and sentence structure, but has no impact on the improvement of the accuracy in terms of noun endings. And it also comes to us that, for IWCF, it contributes to the improvement of verbs, noun endings, wrong words, and sentence structures as to their accuracy. By making a comparison between DWCF and IWCF, although no statistically significant difference can be found in the improvement of the four types of accuracy, the microscopic difference does exist, which is that IWCF functions slightly better than DWCF as it can enhance the accuracy of the noun endings.
At last, the study also discovers that most of the students hold an active view of WCF. And most of them prefer IWCF to DWCF; even they have faith in that IWCF is more conducive to the improvement of their English writing skills as it enables students to participate in the error correction process which makes them more sensitive to the errors in language features.
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