The Long-term Effect of Indirect Selective and Indirect Comprehensive Corrective Feedback on Improving Writing Accuracy

Abstract

This study investigated the comparative effectiveness of indirect selective and indirect comprehensive written corrective feedback in improving the writing accuracy of first year university students. For this purpose, students in two sections (N=52) who were taught a writing course by one teacher were purposely selected, and were randomly assigned into a selective and a comprehensive feedback groups. The selective feedback group students were offered with indirect CF by underlining five selected grammatical error types and writing codes over those errors. Conversely, the comprehensive feedback group students were provided with the same kind of CF on all of the grammarerrors they produced. The treatment process took 42 days in which the participant students were made to write three expository paragraphs: a pre-test, an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test. The results showed that indirect selective corrective CFresulted in significant gains in writing accuracy between compositions one and three as well as between compositions two and three. On the other hand, the indirect comprehensive CF group students didn’t bring significant improvements in their writing accuracy between any of the writing occasions.  It was also found that there was no significant difference in the writing accuracy improvement of the two groups in the immediate posttest. However, during the delayed posttest writing, the indirect selective CF brought better improvementsin writingaccuracy (at P=0.01) than the indirect comprehensive CF.