The Effect of Considering Students' Attitudes Towards Methods of Error Correction on the Grammatical Accuracy of their English Writing

An extremely important issue in any approach of teaching and learning second/foreign language is that students receive feedback on their activities in second/foreign language learning milieu. There are many strategies that teachers adopt to provide students with evidence that what they have just produced in their writing activities is incorrect. However, there has not been much attempt to investigate the effect of considering the students' attitudes in adopting these error correction  trategies. The present study was an attempt to explore the effect of considering student's attitudes towards error correction on the grammatical accuracy of their English writing. For this purpose two groups, experimental and control, passing writing essay course as partial requirement of their study at university, were selected. The students in both groups took part in an original IELTS test as a pre-test. For the first half of the term (8 sessions) the students in both groups received similar writing instruction. They also received feedback on their writing activities. Then, a questionnaire was given to the teachers to find out how correlated their methods of error correction are. The results showed that the methods used by them were different. After that, an early version of a questionnaire
developed by Icy Lee (2005), after some modifications, was given to both experimental and control groups to check the students' attitudes towards writing error correction strategies. The data obtained from this questionnaire was analyzed to highlight those error correction strategies prefered by most students. Then, the teachers in both groups were informed about the result of the questionnaires. The teacher of the experimental group adjusted and modified his error correction methods according to those preferred by the students for the second half of the term. The teacher in the control group, on the other hand, ignored the students preferences in writing error corrections. Finally, both groups took part in IELTS test as posttest. The result showed that the students in the experimental group outperformed the students in the control group on grammatical accuracy in English writing.