Writing and feedback in the EFL classroom: Providing effective feedback for Japanese university students

The aim of this study is to investigate the efficacy of written corrective feedback for Japanese learners. The study focuses on explicit feedback and metalinguistic feedback, which were compared to determine which type of feedback would improve students’ writing most significantly. The participants are 36 Japanese university students, freshmen, whose English proficiency levels range from A2 to B1 on CEFR levels at an English grammar class. They are separated into two groups: a) explicit feedback group; and b) metalinguistic feedback group. The result shows that the mean score for explicit feedback group is higher than that of metalinguistic feedback group in the second writing task. Moreover, the effect size is 0.4, which is very significant. The result indicates that explicit feedback is more effective than metalinguistic feedback for Japanese learners simply because explicit feedback would be more understandable than metalinguistic feedback.