The Impact of Indirect Focused and Unfocused Corrective Feedback on Written Accuracy

Usually writing teachers feel commitment to provide their learners with corrective feedback (CF) to their linguistic errors. The study investigated whether two types of written corrective feedback, indirect focused corrective feedback and indirect unfocused corrective feedback, produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by high intermediate EFL learners. In this study, 54 female EFL learners formed two experimental groups and one control group. One experimental group received indirect focused written CF, and the other experimental group received indirect unfocused written CF for six weeks. The control group, nevertheless, received no particular feedback within this period. Results of performing ANOVA with post-hoc tests revealed the accuracy development of both experimental groups. However, unfocused group achieved the highest accuracy gain scores for simple past tense forms (copula past tense, regular past tense and irregular past tense) subject-verb agreement, articles, and prepositions. It was further found that unfocused feedback can contribute to grammatical accuracy but its long-term effectiveness is not quite as significant as its short-term effectiveness. The study also suggested that unfocused written CF reflects better teacher’s objective as it views writing correction as a whole rather than as a way of practicing grammar.