ELT Journal Advance Access originally published online on August 13, 2008
ELT Journal 2009 63(3):204-211; doi:10.1093/elt/ccn043
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
The value of a focused approach to written corrective feedback
John Bitchener is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Social Sciences at AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand. He teaches on the MA in Applied Language Studies programme and supervises a wide range of Masters and Doctoral thesis students. His research interests include written and oral corrective feedback and the discourse patterning of academic genre. He is President of the Applied Linguistics Association of New Zealand and Co-Editor of New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics
Ute Knoch is a research fellow at the Language Testing Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD at the University of Auckland focusing on diagnostic writing assessment. Her research interests are in the areas of language assessment (particularly the assessment of writing, rating scales, rater training, and the assessment of languages for specific purposes) as well as language pedagogy and language and immigration. She is a recipient of a Spaan Fellowship in Second and Foreign Language Assessment from the University of Michigan in 2006 and 2008
Email: john.bitchener{at}aut.ac.nz
Email: uknoch{at}unimelb.edu.au
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Abstract |
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Investigations into the most effective ways to provide ESL learners with written corrective feedback have often been overly comprehensive in the range of error categories examined. As a result, clear conclusions about the efficacy of such feedback have not been possible. On the other hand, oral corrective feedback studies have produced clear, positive results from studies that have targeted particular error categories. This article presents the results of a study that examined the effectiveness of targeting only two functional error categories with written corrective feedback in order to see if such an approach was also helpful for ESL writers. The ten-month study was carried out with 52 low-intermediate ESL students in Auckland, New Zealand. Assigned to groups that received written corrective feedback or no written corrective feedback, the students produced five pieces of writing (pre-test, immediate post-test, and three delayed post-tests) that described what was happening in a given picture. Two functional uses of the English article system (referential indefinite ‘a’ and referential definite ‘the’) were targeted in the feedback. The study found that those who received written corrective feedback on the two functions outperformed the control group on all four post-tests.