THE EFFECTS OF INDIRECT WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN EFL STUDENTS’ GRAMMATICAL ACCURACY AND ITS IMPACT ON STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION.

Abstract

: To investigate the effects of corrective feedback in EFL students’ grammatical accuracy, 85 7th graders from the Adventist schools in Chillan, Chile, participated in a quasi-experimental study in the form of a writing workshop. The students were divided into three groups, two of them receiving a specific type of indirect written corrective feedback, located and not located correspondingly. The remaining group served as a control group. The participants exchanged letters with other students during 6 weeks in 4 writing instances. Each letter was corrected in aspects of grammar, capitalization, punctuation and spelling. The four writing instances were followed by a personal interview with the participants of the study to know their perceptions towards the activity in which they had participated. After the 6 weeks of the study, results showed that grammatical mistakes made by the students in their letters decreased significantly in all three groups with no significant difference among the groups. However, located corrective feedback showed the greatest improvement together with the control group. Regarding motivation, results showed that students felt motivated when their writing served a purpose such as communication in the case of this investigation; and in terms of preference, students preferred the kinds of feedback used in this study more than the traditional feedback provided by teachers nowadays consisting of red Xs.