The value of a focused approach to written corrective feedback

Abstract

Investigations into the most effective ways to provide ESL learners with written corrective feedback have often been overly comprehensive in the range of error categories examined. As a result, clear conclusions about the efficacy of such feedback have not been possible. On the other hand, oral corrective feedback studies have produced clear, positive results from studies that have targeted particular error categories. This article presents the results of a study that examined the effectiveness of targeting only two functional error categories with written corrective feedback in order to see if such an approach was also helpful for ESL writers. The ten-month study was carried out with 52 low..