Effects of Corrective Feedback on College Students' English Writing Accuracy

This study aims at investigating the overall effects of corrective feedback provided by the teacher on the development of EFL students' writing accuracy and the relationship between error types and revision outcomes in accordance with writing genre and the frequency of draft. For the present study, 12 college students' writing samples were collected according to the three genres of descriptive, explorative, and argumentative essays. Corrective feedback was given by the instructor two times on the I st and 2nd drafts of the essays, and the students were asked to revise the drafts based on the feedback provided by the instructor. They had to produce three drafts for each genre. The grammatical errors they committed in writing were analyzed in the categories of genre, the frequency of draft, students' revision behaviors (six types), and error types (13 types). The findings from the study were that corrective feedback was fairly conducive to the development of the EFL students' writing accuracy, and that the students showed differing levels of progress through different error revision behaviors in their essay writing in terms of error types depending upon genre and the frequency of draft.