Investigating the Effects of Written Corrective Feedback and Revision on EFL Learners’ Production of Grammatical Structures

Abstract

The study was an attempt to examine the effects of three types of written corrective feedback namely direct, indirect, and metalinguistic, and the related responses (with and without revision) on the production of grammatical structures by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. 180 language learners were chosen out of a population pool of 260 participants and assigned to six groups of 30 learners based on their performance on Oxford Quick Placement Test (QPT): DCF with and without revision, ICF with and without revision, MCF with and without revision. Provided with different types of feedback, the students in any of six experimental groups were given instruction on present and past perfect tenses. A pre-test -post-test design was applied to conduct the study. Participants in each group were required to take Dicto-Comp as a pre-test. After being offered with the relevant treatments, a parallel post-test was run. The results showed that students in all experimental groups outperformed their knowledge of present/past perfect tenses from the pre-test to the post-test. Students in the 'DCF with revision' outperformed all other groups, and the groups required to make revisions (i.e., DCF / ICF / MCF with revision) outperformed the corresponding groups with no revision, and the only groups whose scores (between pre-test and post-test) showed more variation were MCF with and without revision. The results provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of teacher feedback on L2 writing ability at large and learning these two tenses at least for the participants of the present study. Furthermore, these results suggested that providing written corrective feedback can be beneficial as an enhancing element in the curriculum development for improving EFL learners’ writing ability.