Korean College Students’ English Writing with and without Error Correction

Korean College Students’ English Writing with and without Error Correction

  This study investigates the degree to which Korean college students’ writing can be improved with and without error correction as regards accuracy and fluency in their free journal writing. 33 students of different majors and proficiency levels participated in the study. They focused on meaning during a no-correction period (seven weeks), and then they received error correction during a correction period (seven weeks). Even though some students showed an increase in accuracy after no correction was provided, more accuracy improvement was found after the error correction period. In addition, improvement in syntactic complexity was found after the students received error correction, in spite of a decrease in the length of the students’ written texts. Even though statistical analysis for accuracy and fluency change did not show significant mean differences except for shorter sentence length after error correction, the findings provide evidence in favor of error correction in spite of the inconclusive debate over the efficacy of error correction in the field. The results also suggest that Korean learners of English in an EFL context could benefit from error correction in terms of accuracy and fluency development in their writing.