THE EFFECTS OF FOCUSED AND UNFOCUSED WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK.

Abstract

The present research is about the effects of written corrective feedback on students’ new pieces of writing, for which focused and unfocused corrective feedback were provided. It is an experimental and quantitative study, whose participants were students of an intermediate level of the English teacher training program of the Adventist University of Chile. They were randomly divided into three different groups, two experimental groups and a control group. One of the experimental groups received focused corrective feedback and the other one received unfocused corrective feedback in order to identify which variable (focused or unfocused corrective feedback) is the one that results in better accuracy at the moment of writing new pieces of texts. The theoretical background for our research is based on studies carried out by different researchers (Bitchener & Knoch, 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Sheen, 2007) who have supported the idea of giving direct written corrective feedback as the most effective method to avoid learners’ future errors. Despite the fact that their studies have been done in other countries, their results are closely related to the ones explained in this report. Now, the claim that focused direct written corrective feedback is the most effective one to improve accuracy in students’ new pieces of writing has been proved.