The Effects of Four Different Types of Corrective Feedback on EFL Students’ Writing in Taiwan

This study compared four ways of responding to EFL students in writing class to study whether they resulted in different outcomes in term of student‟s errors in writing. A total of 119 intermediate level students were selected as subjects, including students from three English reading and writing classes, and some voluntary participants. The students of three English reading and writing classes received three different kinds of reviews for their writing: one group received coded corrective feedback from the teacher followed by peer to peer feedback and student-teacher conference; one group received coded corrective feedback from the teacher followed by student-teacher conference only; and one group received feedback of direct written correction only. The group of the voluntary participants served as the control group, which received no correction on their grammatical errors in their writing. The results showed that the group receiving coded corrective feedback from the teacher followed by the student-teacher conference only and the group receiving coded corrective feedback from the teacher followed by the peer-peer interaction and student-teacher conference outperformed the group receiving written correction from the teacher and the group receiving no feedback in terms of verb and noun endings in their post-review writings. In addition, this study reconfirmed that highly rule-governed linguistic knowledge, such as noun endings, can be learned; it also revealed that peer interaction as well as student-teacher interaction can facilitate this learning.