The present study uses experimental and control group data to demonstrate thatdifferent teacher feedback on students' compositions results in significant differencebetween two groups in the long-term improvement of writing accuracy. Thecorrection method employed for the experimental group is correction withcorresponding explicit explanations, whose efficacy is observed clearly in thisempirical study, whereas the control group receives no error correction but generalcommentary. From the experiment, it can be concluded that the control group hasmade much less progress in EFL writing accuracy than the experimental group.However, the result of the first study casts doubt on this progress of students' writing.Why does the experimental group make such progress after they receive teachers'explicit feedback? To get a better insight into the truth behind the result, weinvestigate, in the second study, students' preference to and attitudes towards teachers'feedback on their writing. Amazingly, a majority of both the experimental group andthe control group favor the most the new correction method we applied into the firststudy, according to their self-report in our questionnaire. In this way, their preferenceechoes with our observation in the first study. Therefore, we contend that thecorrection with corresponding explicit explanations is more helpful for students'long-term progress in writing accuracy and should be applied into EFL teaching ofwriting.
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