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Developing Second Language Literacy: Taiwanese College Students’ Error Types in Focused Feedback Effectiveness

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English Literacy Instruction for Chinese Speakers

Abstract

Focused grammar feedback studies (which targeted one or two error types for corrections) have been criticized for investigating the effects of correction mostly on English article errors. This chapter reports results of a new feedback study that expanded the inventory of error types: article use, subject-verb agreement, and verb-noun collocation errors. Results for the immediate posttest writing task showed focused feedback to be effective for two error types: subject-verb agreement and verb-noun collocation. In delayed posttest writing, the feedback benefit was retained only for subject-verb agreement and beyond all expectations, the feedback became effective for article usages. This suggests to writing classroom instructors that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to correct language errors of all sorts.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The research reported in this chapter was supported by grant #107-2410-H-263-008-MY2 of Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

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Correspondence to Chian-Wen Kao .

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Appendix: Writing Tasks over the Three Testing Stages

Appendix: Writing Tasks over the Three Testing Stages

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Kao, CW. (2019). Developing Second Language Literacy: Taiwanese College Students’ Error Types in Focused Feedback Effectiveness. In: Reynolds, B.L., Teng, M.F. (eds) English Literacy Instruction for Chinese Speakers. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6653-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6653-6_15

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-6652-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-6653-6

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