The Use of Immediate Feedback and Error Correction in Improving University Students’ Writing (A Tale of Two Methods)

Abstract

Yala Rajabhat University students need to improve their writing skill in English. This research aimed to find a method of teaching to improve the YRU students’ skill in writing, and then to compare the method found to the traditional lecture method.The population included two groups of 46third year students majoring in English. The instruments used were a pre-test and a post-test. For both pre- and post-tests, the students were told to write about 15 to 20 sentenceson the topic of a tennis ball. These tests were blindly evaluated by other English lecturers and rated from one to four according to the degree of improvement. The results showed a small insignificant difference between the two groups of students in the improvement of their writing skill (traditional method: mean = 2.52 +/- 1.02; error correction/feedback method: mean = 2.69 +/- 0.75). This result shows that the method of teaching writing based on error correction and immediate feedback is a good way to teach writing to university students, and can be another tool for English teachers to use.