Long-term Effects of Written Corrective Feedback on Korean EFL Students’ Writing

The efficacy of corrective feedback (CF) on L2 students’ writing has been widely debated among second language acquisition (SLA) as well as second language (L2) writing researchers, yet any conclusive assertion to date has not been made, thus calling for further research. The purpose of this paper is to examine long-term benefits of unfocused direct written CF on L2 students’ written accuracy improvement. Twelve Korean EFL university students (6 experimental students and 6 control students) participated in this study. Two drafts groups of essays and placement test essays from the spring semester of 2010 and selfcorrection papers and error correction papers from the spring semester of 2011 were analyzed using the framework suggested by Ferris (2010). In analyzing the data, three grammatical categories, article, verb, and preposition, were focused on. The study found that unfocused direct written feedback did not appear to have any effect on Korean EFL students’ written accuracy in the short term. More precisely, there was no arguable improvement in the written accuracy of the experimental students from the first essay without having written CF in 2010 to the second essay written after receiving CF in the first essay. However, in comparison of their 2010 papers and 2011 papers, the latter was considerably more accurate than the former. Interestingly though, there was no obvious indication that the experimental students’ writing was more accurate than that of the control students in terms of three grammatical categories, which calls for further research on whether or not the experimental students’ written accuracy improvement over time was resulted by CF they received.