Evidence in support of written corrective feedback

The extent to which ESL learners benefit from written corrective feedback has been debated at length since Truscott (1996) mounted a case for its abolition. Ten years later, the debate continues, not only because little attention has been given to testing its efficacy over time but also because studies that have investigated the issue have not always been well designed and have produced conflicting results (Ferris, 2004, 2006). This article presents the results of a 2-month study of the efficacy of written corrective feedback to 75 low intermediate international ESL students in Auckland, New Zealand. Assigned to 4 groups (direct corrective feedback, written and oral meta-linguistic explanation; direct corrective feedback and written meta-linguistic explanation; direct corrective feedback only; the control group received no corrective feedback), the students produced three pieces of writing (pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test) that described what was happening in a given picture. Two functional uses of the English article system (referential indefinite “a” and referential definite “the”) were targeted in the feedback. The study found that the accuracy of students who received written corrective feedback in the immediate post-test outperformed those in the control group and that this level of performance was retained 2 months later.