The Effects of Written Feedback and Revision-focus Direction on Student Revision and Writing Improvement

Abstract

Despite the copious studies on written corrective feedback (CF), a number of issues in the field of written feedback and L2 writing remain under-researched, including L2 student writing development in content and rhetorical aspects (Goldstein, 2004), the effect of feedback on student autonomous revision skills (Bitchener & Ferris, 2012), and the moderation of contextual factors (Ellis, 2010). This thesis reports on a study that addresses the aforementioned research gaps by drawing on L1 revision theories. It investigates the effects of written feedback type and revision-focus manipulation on the revision and writing development of upper-intermediate English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in China. The mediation of textual level (i.e., discourse and linguistic levels) is also examined. The study was conducted in a Chinese university. Seventy-seven first-year non-English-major undergraduates participated in this five-week project which involved a treatment stage as well as pre- and post-treatment stages. In each of the pre- and post-treatment stages, the participants wrote an argumentative essay and revised it autonomously. In the treatment stage, they were first assigned to four treatment groups formed by the manipulation of two factors: written feedback type (identification + diagnosis vs. identification + solution) and revision-focus manipulation (± revision-focus direction), and one control group who received no feedback or revision-focus direction. The participants then completed three writing-revising tasks on three controversial topics. The design allowed for the analysis of the immediate treatment effect on revision, the treatment effect on autonomous revision and new writing. Results revealed a positive immediate effect of treatment on revision. The effect was more evident for content, organisation, and grammatical accuracy and less evident for lexical accuracy. Written feedback type did not make a difference. Discourse-level text quality benefited more from the treatment with revision-focus direction, while grammatical accuracy benefited more from the treatment without revision-focus direction. Results concerning autonomous revision demonstrated an overall ineffectiveness of written feedback, irrespective of feedback type or textual level. However, treatment with revision-focus direction enhanced student autonomous revision on discourse levels. Results concerning new writing indicated the effectiveness of treatment for organisation quality improvement and its overall ineffectiveness for accuracy increase, the advantage of diagnostic feedback in improving content quality and grammatical accuracy, and the advantage of + revision-focus direction in developing content and organisation quality.