Abstract
The theoretical perspectives reviewed in the previous chapter have led many in the field to believe that written CF can have a positive effect on L2 learning. The recent written CF studies reviewed in this chapter confirmed the theoretical expectation. However, it needs to be noted that although more explicit written CF types, such as metalinguistic explanation, direct correction, and direct correction plus metalinguistic explanation were proved to facilitate the learning of English articles and past tense for students of different proficiency levels, more research is needed to find out the correlation between the complexity and written CF type. Furthermore, whether these types of written CF could facilitate the learning of more complex language features needs to be examined. Last but not least, learner's factors, including affective factors, learning aptitude, motivation, and so on need to be investigated regarding the extent to which they may have an impact on the effect of written CF.
TopStudies On Whether Written Corrective Feedback Can Facilitate L2 Development
Over the last 20 years, written CF researchers have been dedicated to proving written CF is able to facilitate L2 development by looking at accuracy improvement after written CF was provided. Some of the studies looked at accuracy improvement in revisions and some in new written texts. Having found convincing evidence regarding the effect of written CF on improved accuracy in both revisions and subsequent written texts, recent studies have started investigating whether and to what extent the improved accuracy could be retained over time. However, among these studies, some included a wide range of error types, from linguistic forms to spelling and punctuation; while others only focused on one or a few linguistic forms. This section will first review the revision studies, and then move on to new text studies, which include focused and unfocused studies, and the studies which compared the focused and unfocused approach.