The Importance Of Direct Feedback In Language Learning

Writing is an important skill contributing to the student’s language learning. However, learning how to write is not easy because writing is considered the most difficult skill to acquire. According to Zacharia (2007), it requires having a certain amount of L2 background knowledge about the rhetorical organization, appropriate language use or specific lexicon with which they want to communicate their ideas. Therefore, the teachers have to make an effort to help students enhance their writing skill and increase their motivation to accomplish the writing task. One of the most useful techniques to help the student develop writing skill is giving feedback. There are two common types of feedback that teachers usually use when give feedback are:

However, there are two main types of feedback that teacher usually uses in the writing class. They are direct feedback and indirect feedback. Direct feedback is a technique of correcting students’ mistake by giving an explicit written correction (Srichanyachon, 2012). The teachers give direct feedback to the students, upon noticing a grammatical mistake, by giving the appropriate answer or the expected response above or near the linguistic or grammatical error. There are many ways for teacher to give direct feedback such as by striking out an incorrect or unnecessary word, phrase, or morpheme; inserting a missing or expected word, phrase, or morpheme; and by providing the correct linguistic form above or near the erroneous form (Ellis, 2008; Ferris, 2006), usually above it or in the margin. Direct feedback has the benefit that it provides explicit information about the correct. It is clear to see that direct feedback is suitable for beginner students, or in a situation when the students make mistakes but they cannot do self-correction such as sentence structure and word choice, and when teachers want to highlight error patterns that require student

The indirect correction may not succeed because it does not provide sufficient information to resolve complicated errors. In addition to these claims, learners whose errors are corrected by indirectly do not know whether their own corrections are true or not because that indirect corrective feedback is seen inappropriate for L2 learners. Furthermore, Zaman & Azad (2012) found that many students were not motivated to attend to indirect feedback given to them. They preferred written direct feedback as this was easier to understand and they thought they would gain from this. The proficiency of students are low, this is probably the reason why they prefer direct feedback. Therefore direct corrective feedback is suggested when learners are low levels of English