Effects of indirect corrective feedback and metalinguistic corrective feedback on Chinese-lower secondary students’ English writing ability

Abstract

The current study aimed to investigate the different effects of indirect corrective feedback and metalinguistic corrective feedback on Chinese lower-secondary students’ English writing ability and explored students’ opinions towards the two types of feedback in two aspects: students’ preference and students’ understanding. The participants were thirty grade 8 students who studied at a public school in Rizhao City, Shandong Province, China. The instruments for collecting data were pretest, posttests, and interview questions. Quantitative results from paired sample t-tests indicated that both indirect and metalinguistic corrective feedback improved students’ writing ability. While quantitative results from the independent sample t-test and two-way repeated measure ANOVA revealed that the difference between the two types of feedback was not significant. The results from the interview revealed that students preferred metalinguistic corrective feedback because it was easier to understand. This study confirmed the positive effects of indirect and metalinguistic corrective feedback on Chinese lower-secondary students’ writing ability.