The effect of direct and indirect/coded metalinguistic written corrective feedback on writing accuracy of tenth grade ESL lebanese students

النوع : Mémoire

Debate about the value of providing corrective written feedback has been a controversial issue in recent years especially after claims done by Truscott's “Case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes” (1996), in which he considers corrective feedback as both ineffective and harmful and should therefore be abandoned. Furthermore, the term "corrective feedback”, which is used to provide information on the accuracy of the linguistic output of the learners, has drawn the attention of both teachers and researchers alike in the process of acquiring a foreign language (Van Beuningen, 2010). This study tried to investigate the effects of the indirect/coded 'metalinguistic’ corrective feedback with regard to accuracy in writing of first-secondary students in a Lebanese public school. This is a quasi-experimental study which investigated the value of corrective feedback on writing and the students’ abilities to self-edit their writing across two feedback conditions: the regular direct correction and the indirect/coded metalinguistic correction. The participants were 40 learners who were divided into two groups: one group of students received direct feedback; i.e., the correct form was written on the student's paper and functioned as the control group. The experimental group received indirect coded metalinguistic feedback; i.e., a symbol representing a specific kind of error was used for the indication of the error. The intervention period for both groups lasted for thirteen weeks. Before the intervention the students sat for a pretest, and after the treatment learners were given a posttest. To discern any significant change in the mean of each group after receiving corrective feedback, paired samples t-test was applied. Based on the results of the posttest, it was revealed that the experimental group which received metalinguistic feedback outperformed the control group which received the direct regular feedback as treatment.