The effectiveness of comprehensive corrective feedback-direct and indirect- on EFL learners' language accuracy, structural complexity and lexical diversity

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Dabboub, AE, 2019. The effectiveness of comprehensive corrective feedback-direct and indirect- on EFL learners' language accuracy, structural complexity and lexical diversity. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

This study investigates the effectiveness of direct and indirect written corrective feedback in improving EFL learners' written language accuracy, complexity and lexical diversity. It also examines the students' strategies in dealing with feedback. It explores students' experiences and students' attitudes towards written corrective feedback. It identifies the factors that affect learners' responses to written corrective feedback. These objectives are achieved by conducting a quasi-experiment followed by students' interviews and case studies.

The results reveal that the effectiveness of corrective feedback varies according to its type and the error type over time. Direct feedback is more effective in improving learners' overall language accuracy, both during revision and in subsequent writing. This finding is attributable to the fact that the participants preferred to have direct corrective feedback, as it is easy to understand and less time consuming when applying it. On the other hand, indirect corrective feedback effectively improves learners' overall accuracy in new written texts. This can be related to the fact that some learners prefer indirect corrective feedback because they believe that indirect correction encourages them to search for the correct forms to their errors and assists them to recognise the errors nature as well as remembering them and not repeating them in their subsequent writing. In addition, this study investigates whether the direct and indirect corrective feedback have different value for grammatical and non-grammatical errors. Results showed that both direct and indirect corrective feedback are beneficial in developing learners' grammatical and non-grammatical accuracy. Moreover, neither direct nor indirect corrective feedback resulted in simplified writing. The findings also revealed that learners value and appreciate to receive corrective feedback on their errors in their writing. They also prefer to have explicit corrections on all their errors (comprehensive CF). There are some difficulties that learners faced when processing feedback such as the teacher's hand writing and the time allocated for revision. In order to overcome these challenges, learners use some strategies, which may include asking for help from their teacher, revising their work carefully and using a grammar book or dictionary.

The findings from this study imply that comprehensive corrective feedback- direct and indirect- have shown to be valuable practice in improving EFL learners’ accuracy and its effectiveness is durable.

Item Type:	Thesis
Creators:	Dabboub, A.E.
Date:	April 2019
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	04 Nov 2019 12:39
Last Modified:	04 Nov 2019 12:39
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/38102