Direct corrective feedback and students’ noticing ability of be-verb forms in esl writing

Abstract

The study examined the role of corrective feedback in helping Malaysian students learn difficult grammatical items through essay writing. Studies have suggested that corrective feedback is beneficial for students and is effective in teaching writing in Second Language Acquisition environment. However, a number of studies have also doubted the efficacy of teachers’ corrective feedback on students’ acquisition of difficult grammatical items. Scholars have argued that corrective feedback does not help the students to notice the difficult grammatical items corrected by teacher. Thus, the current study was set to investigate how direct corrective feedback given by teachers could help students notice difficult grammatical item in particular the ‘be’ verb forms in their essay writing. This case study involved four form four students from native Malay L1 background from a rural school. The students wrote three different drafts of five types of essay for a period of 10 weeks and underwent two sessions of Stimulated Recall Interview. Analysis of errors made in students’ drafts revealed that corrective feedback does help the students to notice ‘be’ verb forms. Analysis of Errors across different genre suggests that errors involving ‘be’ verb forms persist in students albeit in a smaller number. During the stimulated recall interview, students did notice specifically ‘be’ verb forms being corrected by teacher. ‘Be’ verb forms were found to be difficult for the students because they mainly rely on translation method for essay writing. The essays from different types of genres were found to be particularly challenging for the students. However, given more practice and opportunities to learn, students will have higher chances to acquire ‘be’ verb forms. Considering students’ positive response towards corrective feedback, teachers could use corrective feedback as a way to help students to notice and learn difficult grammatical items through essay writings. The pedagogical implication of this study is that improvement is needed in teaching of writing in Malaysia with more emphasis given on a variety of practice on writing as well as providing of corrective feedback. The findings also suggest that teachers need to be creative in providing corrective feedback considering the limitations that they work under