Numerous studies have investigated the effect of the mode of written corrective feedback on the students’ writing development. However, their inconclusive findings have offered confusion rather than solution for writing teachers. This study was invest ...
Numerous studies have investigated the effect of the mode of written corrective feedback on the students’ writing development. However, their inconclusive findings have offered confusion rather than solution for writing teachers. This study was investigated to test the efficacy of written corrective feedback for the beginning, intermediate, and advanced level of English writers. The results of the study indicate that learners show development in writing short and long term regardless of level differences. Among the most frequently appearing 12 errors, seven errors show statistical significance with the direction of frequency differences: These are agreement (Advanced> Intermediate, Low), article (Intermediate, Advanced > Low), parallelism (Low, Intermediate > Intermediate, Advanced), sentence types (Low > Intermediate > Advanced), and word choice (Low > Advanced > Intermediate). For the case of meaning (Low> Intermediate, Advanced), this error was affected by total number of words in the pretest. Mechanics (Low > Advanced, Intermediate) was also affected by total number of words in the pretest and type token ratio. The discriminators which differentiate learner levels are sentence type and mechanic while gender do not have any impact on the learners’ writing abilities. Negative case analysis was conducted to identify negative errors which hinder students’ writing development. For the case of sentence type and mechanic, all of the learners could not acquire regardless of level differences. Selected intermediate level learners could not acquire agreement, verb, meaning, and mechanics, and low level learners deplore their lack of acquisition in agreement, article, meaning, and mechanics. Nam Jiyoung represents half successful learner out of written corrective feedback. He attributed this situation to his habitual laziness due to the heavy alcohol consumption accumulated from the relationships with his peers.