The impact of written corrective feedback on EFL learners’ writing performance

Abstract EN

To date, conflict has existed in the literature on whether or not and how teachers should react to EFL learners' written grammar errors.

To shed light on the factors that may explain such conflicting results, this study investigated the impact of written corrective feedback (WCF) on EFL learners’ writing performance.

For this purpose, 90 male elementary learners were chosen from total number of learners in Urmia Farhangian University.

Based on the result, the students were randomly assigned to one control and two experimental groups with 30 participants in each.

Prior to treatment, students took part in a writing test to homogenize all participants as pre- test.

Both experimental groups underwent the same amount of teaching and the same writing topics during 8 sessions of treatment while the control group was not engaged in any kind of treatment.

At the end of treatment, a writing test (KET) was administered to three groups as immediate post- test and delayed post- test.

The results of the statistical analysis demonstrated that learners benefited significantly from corrective feedback in their writing tasks.

That is focused corrective feedback is more effective than the other types of feedback and the unfocused one was second effective type of feedback.

However, the control groups had the lowest performance which means that this written feedback is effective in improving the performance of students on past simple.

The implications are discussed in terms of effective autonomy supportive teaching in EFL contexts.