Effects of direct and indirect corrective feedback on grammar in writing. An error-analysis on 65 Swedish EFL students’ grammatical accuracy

Abstract

Students’ language progress and their ability to acquire new knowledge is in direct connection to the feedback given to them by their educators. Written corrective feedback has been broadly studied during the last decades, yet, leaving the research results inconclusive. There has been a long-term debate about what type of feedback is most effective on EFL/ESL learners’ grammatical accuracy, and the present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of direct and indirect corrective feedback on grammar in written production. The study is a pre-test post-test error-analysis on 65 16 year-old Swedish EFL learners in upper secondary school. The results show that both the students receiving direct, and the students receiving indirect corrective feedback, made fewer grammatical errors on the post-test compared to the pre-test. The students that received direct corrective feedback made fewer grammatical errors on the post-test than the students that received indirect corrective feedback, but no statistical significance was found. Level of grammatical proficiency and its relation to the feedback given was also investigated, however, no significant differences were found between the groups. Finally, some pedagogical implications are made, teachers are advised to not be frightened of error correction, since its effectiveness is well established by this and previous research. Teachers are also encouraged to involve the students in the feedback process, by e.g. revision, and to learn more about their students’ needs, in order to give them the feedback they need. Lastly, some suggestions for further research are presented.