Effects of Direct and Indirect Written Corrective Feedback on Bhutanese Learners' Grammatical Accuracy over Time

This study investigated the effect of direct and indirect written corrective feedback (WCF) on the grammatical accuracy in the use of past tense and articles by grade eight learners (n = 45). The study also explored the extent to which the use of WCF may affect the syntactic complexity in the learners' writing. The learners were selected and purposively divided into three levels of English language proficiency (high, average, and low), from which they were randomly assigned into two treatment groups and one control group. Participants wrote narrative essays on a given topic, each for the pretest, followed by three treatment sessions, posttest, and delayed posttest. One treatment group received direct WCF while the other received indirect WCF. The control group did not receive WCF. The findings of this experiment show that the indirect WCF group (M = 75.26, SD = 12.83) outperformed the direct WCF group (M = 60.98, SD = 13.14) and the control group (M = 56.64, SD = 20.42) significantly on the grammatical accuracy measures taken at posttest. It was found that WCF did not affect the syntactic complexity of the learners' writing. It is surmised that a sustained and extensive use of indirect WCF may improve Bhutanese learners' written grammatical accuracy.