Effects of synthesised coded corrective feedback on primary level students’ grammatical awareness and self-correction skills

Abstract

Written corrective feedback (WCF), especially direct and indirect corrective feedback, has been studied repeatedly to solve students’ problem of inaccurate writing. The indirect coded corrective feedback (ICCF), which is a more balanced method, is also not exempted from solving this particular problem. Although many ICCF studies have found beneficial impacts, it still lacks understanding, especially on younger students. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effects of ICCF that was synthesised with two classes of errors (omission and mis-formation) adapted from the Surface Strategy Taxonomy to determine its effects on primary school students’ grammatical awareness and self-correction skills in English writing. This quasi-experimental study was conducted on 60 students (experimental, n = 30; control, n = 30) from an English language centre in Selangor, Malaysia. The results revealed that only the experimental group made significant short-term and long-term improvements in their grammatical awareness and self-correction skills, and they also statistically outperformed the control group. Hence, the ICCF method is more effective than the traditional classroom method in immediately enhancing and retaining students’ grammatical awareness and self-correction skills for up to 4 weeks. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of this study.