The Effect of Direct and Indirect Corrective Feedback on Students’ Writing Quality

Abstract

Giving feedback both direct and indirect is believed to help students write better. This paper aims to investigate whether there is an effect of direct corrective feedback on students’ writing quality. There were 26 students as participants. Each student was exposed to two different types of feedback, they are direct and indirect feedback. After receiving each type of feedback, the students’ writings were analyzed. The individual score of the students were compared to know the effect of the given feedback. The stastical analysis showed that the students’ writings were better when they recieved direct feedback than the indirect one. Direct feedback helped students in revising their draft more accurate than when they received indirect feedback. It is suggested that the teachers apply direct corrective feedback to help students perform better in writings. Furthermore, future reasearchers intending to conduct similar study are recommended to use larger size of participants in order to confirm the effectiveness of different feedback types. A particular aspect of grammatical errors can be investigated further to know the effectiveness of each corrective feedback type.