An Investigation of the Effects of Three Post-writing Methods: Focused Feedback, Learner-oriented Focused Feedback, and No Feedback

There have been inconclusive results regarding the issue of feedback and no feedback to student compositions. The present study investigated potential differences in the effect, on writing accuracy, of focused meta-linguistic feedback, learner-oriented focused meta-linguistic feedback, and mere writing practice on overall accuracy in Iranian EFL writings. Because of dramatic student attrition and two failures in the data collection phase which was due to lack of student commitment to performing the tasks, the study involved three groups: a) experimental A (33→9) who wrote on topics, received feedback, and kept edit logs and error tally sheets; b) experimental B (33→7) who only received feedback; and c) control (33→6) who merely wrote on topics. The results indicated that all the three methods are almost equally ineffective to accuracy improvement of student writings in the targeted areas, thus refuting claims for the effectiveness of both feedback and no feedback methods.