Effects of error feedback salience on EFL composition editing

Abstract

Studies on error feedback in L2 writing instructions have provided mostly positive evidence for improvement of accuracy over time. Compared to direct correction of students' errors, indirect feedback is expected to provide students with more opportunities to consider their errors and self-edit their writings. One issue which has not been sufficiently investigated is what type of error feedback has greater power to help students self-edit. Another issue is the different effect of the feedback on different types of grammatical errors. This experimental study investigated 76 beginning to lower-intermediate EFL students' self-editing abilities across two feedback conditions and five grammatical error categories. Examined feedback conditions differed in their explicitness: (1) indicating errors with codes of the above five error categories; (2) indicating errors by underlining them but with no error-category mark. The five error categories were: (1) verbs; (2) noun endings; (3) articles and other determinants; (4) word choice; and (5) sentence structure. The findings were: (1) there was no significant difference between the effects of the two feedback types, but (2) there were significant differences in correctly self-edited error ratios among those five error types. The study suggests that teachers should use different types of feedback according to the error types.