Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback and Students’ Response to Feedback in L2 Writing

Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback and Students’ Response to Feedback in L2 Writing Pilar S. Caparas, Ph. D. Western Mindanao State University Region IX, Zamboanga City pilarcaparas@gmail.com Abstract The study of corrective feedback (CF) has been gaining more prolific attention in the field of Second language Acquisition (SLA) up to this time. Theorists, researchers, educators have been investigating which forms of CF are effective. The study determined the use of metalinguistic corrective feedback and students’ response to such feedback in L2 writing. It also investigated the students’ belief on which features of their writing teachers should pay attention to. Forty students (8=males, 32=females) were given two writing tasks in which the teacher coded the errors using metalinguistic clues in their essays. The students revised their first draft following the given linguistic error codes. From these tasks, the teacher analyzed the preponderant linguistic errors and the types of revisions the students incorporated employing the list of error codes adopted from Corpuz (2010), Ellis’s (2009) typology of written corrective feedback and Ferris’s (2006) types of revisions. The results showed that the most prevalent linguistic errors committed by the students were punctuation and the most common type of revision category in the redrafts of the students was error corrected. Further, the survey conducted to the students revealed that error in grammar (82%) is the top most feature the students would like their teacher to correct in their writing. This seemed to suggest that the students have positive perception on corrective feedback. The results suggested that during the revision, the metalinguistic clues were not enough to rectify the errors and that the linguistic competence of the students was needed to make the corrections. Essentially, most of the participants strongly agreed that the use of metalinguistic corrective feedback with the use of correction symbols facilitate their revision tasks. Keywords: Corrective feedback; Metalinguistic corrective feedback, grammatical errors, SLA 1 Introduction Corrective Feedback (CF) has been a prolific ground for research up to this time. “Corrective feedback refers to any signal that a learner’s utterance may be erroneous in some way” (Nassaji & Kartchava, 2021, p.1). “It is also a response that is provided by a teacher, a researcher, or a peer in reaction to an error committed by the second/foreign language (L2) learner”( Leow & Driver, 2021, p. 65) A CF can be oral or written. The role of written corrective feedback (WCF) has been a topic of immense interest in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research to date, according to Brown (2007). Lightbown and Spada (2009) broadly define CF, also known as negative feedback, as “any indication to the learners that their use of the target language is incorrect.” Van Beuningen (2010) affirms that “CF is a widely applied pedagogical tool and its use finds support in SLA theory, yet practical and theoretical objections to its usefulness have been raised” (p.1). To extend this definition to the written discourse, written corrective feedback (WCF), refers to “various ways a reader can respond to a second language writer by indicating …

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