Focused written corrective feedback and linguistic target mastery: Conceptual replication of Bitchener and Knoch (2010)

Abstract

Abstract This study replicates Bitchener and Knoch (2010), which reported that written corrective feedback (WCF) targeting two single-rule English article functions (first mention a and subsequent mention the ) is effective. The current replication study repeats the original study in most respects but adds to the assessment of the intervention's efficacy by recording the impact of focused WCF on all functional article uses, and not just on the two uses targeted by the WCF. The results of the replication study partially confirm Bitchener & Knoch's results and introduce some further differentiated findings. It is concluded that while the focused WCF leads to increased accuracy in the targeted functions of articles, the same WCF may negatively impact the remaining non-targeted article functions, especially for the group that received the most explicit WCF in the form of metalinguistic explanation.