Parisa Ahmadi - ELT Instructor, Payam Noor University, Ardabil Br anch & Ph.D. Candidate in TEFL, Urmia University
Javad Gholami - Associate Professor, ELT Department, Faculty of Humanities, Urmia University
Parviz Alavinia - Associate Professor, ELT Department, Faculty of Humanities, Urmia University
Mehdi Sarkhosh - Associate Professor, ELT Department, Faculty of Humanities, Urmia University

This study provides an overview of research that has investigated the effectiveness of written corrective feedback on student writing. The efficacy of error correction is a central issue for the theory and practice of writinginstruction. Writing is an essential skill that is necessary for academic success. All language learners need to developbecause it allows learners to communicate effectively in the second language. The significant role of feedback inwriting has been the focus of attention in recent second language research. Corrective feedback (CF) as any feedback provided to a learner, from any source that contains evidence of learner error of language form which can be oral orwritten, explicit or implicit. This study investigated the type of feedback direct, visual, explicit written feedback andgiven to 55 students on three types of error (prepositions, the past simple tense, and the definite article). The collecteddata from pretest and posttest were analyzed using the one-way ANOVA. The result indicated that there was asignificant difference in the writing ability of the students who received either direct or indirect feedback and those who did not receive any feedback. The results revealed an improved accuracy in new pieces of writing over a 12 weekperiod. The study found a significant effect for the combination of written and conference feedback on accuracy levelsin the use of the past simple tense and the definite article in new pieces of writing but no overall effect on accuracyimprovement for feedback types when the three error categories were considered as a single group. Results are expected to raise the awareness of writing practitioners regarding their own practice in an EFL context

Accuracy; Corrective feedback; Error correction; Linguistic error; Student writing