Learner self-correction in EFL written compositions

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what degree teacher cues or hints help their students correct their own errors in EFL written compositions, and what kinds of cues are more effective in self-correction. The sixty-two Japanese college students who were sampled were required to correct their errors by themselves, using the cues provided by their teachers. The finding of the study was that the more detailed the cues to the errors, the higher the ratio of learner self-correction achieved. That is, learners demonstrated that they could activate their linguistic competence to some extent in order to correct their own errors in written English compositions.