The Effect of Focused and Unfocused Direct Written Corrective Feedback on a New Piece of Writing

The value of written corrective feedback (CF) has been an issue of considerable debate in the literature (e.g. Truscott, 1996; Ferris, 1999), and this polemic has lead to a trend in recent studies to draw on second language acquisition (SLA) research as a way to further comprehend the intricacies of this complex issue. Indeed, Ellis, Sheen Murakami and Takashima (2008) delineate between focused CF and unfocused CF. For direct CF, they found that both types of focuses were effective in new pieces of writing, and that this effect was durable. As only this one study has examined these focuses for the target form of articles, arguably further research is needed with different target forms. With this in mind, the study presented here contrasted the effectiveness of focused direct CF for past tense forms, unfocused direct CF and a control group (no CF) on the accuracy of student writing. Using mixed between-within ANOVAs, it was revealed that all three conditions improved in accuracy between two writing tasks; however, both the focused direct CF and unfocused direct CF groups significantly outperformed the control group in the second piece of writing. 60 College English: Issues and Trends Volume 3 Operationalizing Key Terminology Embedded within the abstract are a number of terms that need to be operationalized prior to reviewing the literature. These included focused CF, unfocused CF and direct CF. Focused CF entails providing feedback on a small number of preselected forms while unfocused CF involves giving feedback on all or an array of errors. Direct CF comprises the crossing out of an error and the provision of its correction above the error. One can thus have focused direct CF or unfocused direct CF.