Effect of Written Corrective Feedback on Korean EFL Learners’ Development of Passive Structure

Abstract

The current study examined immediate and delayed effects of written corrective feedback (CF) and differential effects of two types of CF (direct CF and indirect CF) on the development of passive structure by Korean secondary school EFL learners. The extent to which language proficiency mediated the effect of CF was also investigated. To this end, 46 learners comprising two intact classes – one high proficiency class and one low proficiency class – were divided into two groups according to feedback types. A total of four groups were thus formed: an advanced direct CF group, an advanced indirect CF group, a low direct CF group, and a low indirect CF group. This study found that students performed better in immediate and delayed posttests than in the pretest. The direct CF group performed better in terms of score gains from the pretest to the immediate posttest whereas the indirect CF group performed better in terms of score decrease from the immediate posttest to the delayed posttest. Moreover, this study found that there was no interaction effect between feedback type and proficiency level. These results showed that written CF targeting a single linguistic feature could help students develop knowledge of the target structure.