The Positive Effect of Direct and Indirect Corrective Feedback In ELT Students

Writing in the English language become the most difficult skill, especially for EFL students to master because rarely has chance to write in English. Sentences structure and grammar became the common error found in the students’ written works. In order to produce an error-free piece of English writing, giving feedback is one of the fundamental approach that the teacher should give to the students. In general feedback is a specific information given to their learners related to the assignment or learning process. Hattie and Timperly (2007) assert feedbeck aims to fill in the gap between what the student understands at the time and what is aimed to be finally understood. In writing classes, corrective feedback is defined as a teacher’s indication given to students in order to let them know that their written work contains errors (Lightbown & Spada, 1999). Providing corrective feedback in EFL can be delivered in direct and indirect modes, and both of them can be in wtitten and oral forms. Basically both modes of feedback offer some positive effects.   

                        First of all, direct feedback provided on student’s written work become the better-known corrective feedback in writing class. Likewise, Ellis (2009) states direct feedback is the way to inform students about correct forms and the  the location of the errors. Another group of scholars, Bitchener et al. (2005) indicate that direct feedback is the identification and the correction of errors provided by teachers to students. Direct corrective feedback receives great attention and has been studied extensively in order to determine if it is helpful for students’ writing improvement. Following are some research studies contributing to the effectiveness of direct feedback type. Direct corrective feedback can be A helpful and easily method to improve low proficiency students’ writing skill in a limited time.

Sheen (2007) later concluded that direct corrective feedback was effective in assisting students to correctly use English articles. Moreover, it helped promote the students’ analytic skill in using the language. Especially for begginer students, direct feedback is very useful because it makes use the correct form given by the teacher immediately. According to Srichanyachon’s (2012), direcft feedback helps foster students’ long-term acquisition. Futhermore, it can enhance EFL student especially in learning motivation since they are supported by the teacher who may be the only creditable source for them. Dirrect feedback also improve students’ grammar, article and preposotion knowlegde especially in written form.

The second is indirect corrective feedback. Lightbown and Spada (1999) argue it as the situation in which a teacher indicates the error location, but leave students to self-edit the errors. Likewise, Ferris & Robert (2001) state that indirect corrective feedback is the indication made by a teacher by underlying the errors or giving the codes for the errors. All in all, the purpose of indirect corrective feedback is just to indicate the location of errors without any information of the correct forms. Students have to self-correct the errors they have made.

Researchers believe that this type of feedback can help foster students’ long-term language acquisition. Its advantages can be viewed through the findings from the following studies. Hyland and Hyland (2001) indicate that indirectness of teacher feedback can lead to incomprehension and miscommunication between teachers and students; therefore, they suggest that it is more effective to use this feedback type with high language proficiency students. Ferris and Robert (2001), it was found that indirect feedback assisted students to do self-correction of the treatable grammatical errors, such as verbs, noun endings and articles. In the late 2000s, Noroozizadeh (2009) concluded that through indirect feedback, his advanced level students could self-remove focused grammatical errors from their final draft of writing.  This is in line with the conclusion made by Erlam et al. (2013) which indicates that indirect feedback enables students to self-repair their grammatical errors. Eslami (2014) also lends support to the effectiveness of indirect feedback after proving that it is more useful to help low-intermediate EFL students self-correct simple past tense errors. It also promoted the encouraging environment for writing learning. This type of feedback is more apropriate and effective used in teaching students in high language proviciency.

In short, based on the previous literature, it can be concluded that both teacher direct and indirect feedback, either in the written or oral forms are beneficial to the correction of EFL student writers’ grammatical errors. Which type of feedback is the most effective depends on various factors, so it remains the responsibility of writing teachers to figure out. This review article, to some extent, may help provide the possible guidelines. In addition to teacher feedback, another important factor that cannot be overlooked is a good relationship between teachers and students. The teacher not only give corrective feedback, sriticism, and suggestion, but also praise in order to encourage the students’ motivation. Although the students is made errors, the teacher should establish the studentd motivation by giving them praise, so they can improve. With effective techniques and understanding between teachers and students, it is not far from reach for students to produce a good piece of writing.