The Inconclusive Effectiveness of Indirect, Coded and Direct Written Corrective Feedback on EFL Student Writing

This article examines the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) on the writing of EFL students at a Japanese university. WCF as a research topic has matured over the past several decades, drawing scrutiny in the process. The emergence of communicative language instruction, which sought to destigmatize grammatical errors while de-emphasizing error correction, prompted some critics to argue for an abandonment of WCF while others enumerated its shortcomings. The experiment in this paper investigates the effectiveness of three types of WCF – Indirect, Coded, and Direct – on sentence-initial conjunctions (SICs) in 110 first-year students in a semester-long English course. Results showed that while the error rates of all three groups steadily dropped over the length of the experiment, the rate of the comparison group, which received no WCF on the targeted error, dropped the most. The discussion section proposes several explanations for the results while concluding that although WCF can be beneficial, it is not necessary. The paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of WCF and bears practical implications for those instructors who question whether providing WCF represents the best use of their time.