Effects of direct and indirect feedback on ESL/EFL writing. A literature review focusing on form

Abstract

Feedback is a very broad term involving many different ways of providing information to our students. The effectiveness of feedback has been largely debated throughout history. The major debate had its starting point in Truscott´s (1996) claim that error correction is ineffective and perhaps even harmful. Many researchers objected to this thesis and started extensive research, measuring effects of different feedback types against control groups that did not receive any feedback. This literature review will report the findings from studies measuring whether direct or indirect feedback on form is effective at all and which is most effective for ESL/EFL students´ writing accuracy. Motivation seems to be a factor influencing the effects of feedback as well and therefore studies on this will be reviewed as well. In general the results seem to indicate that feedback- both direct and indirect- is effective, with a growing amount of research favoring focused feedback.