Revisiting the Role of Indirect Written Corrective Feedback in the Light of Written Languaging

Grounded in the sociocultural perspective, talking with/writing to others and the self as mediating cognitive processes has been identified as an origin of second language learning. This crucial role of language has been known as oral and written languaging. This study investigated whether written corrective feedback (WCF) and written languaging bring about improvement in English foreign language (EFL) learners' compositions. To this aim, two groups of EFL learners wrote compositions based on the prompt they received. In the next session, one group reviewed their errors which were indicated by indirect WCF and then languaged about their grammatical errors in their compositions by writing down the rationales behind them. Participants' deliberations and explanations were construed as written languaging episodes (WLEs). On the other hand, the other group reviewed and numbered their errors highlighted by indirect, underlining, WCF, without languaging about them. Moreover, this study sought to probe whether numbers and types of written languaging episodes differed over the five compositions. The micro-analysis of the five writings proved that participants produced the highest number of correctly resolved WLEs. They mostly offered correct reasons behind their errors in response to indirect WCF; unresolved WLEs were the least. The participants did not know the reasons behind their errors in response to WCF. Finally, the results of the study demonstrated that the indirect WCF group producing written languaging outperformed more significantly than the mere indirect WCF group on the posttest.