Differential Effects of Direct vs. Indirect Focused Corrective Feedback on the accurate use of grammatical forms by teenage EFL learners

EFL teachers use different written corrective feedback strategies while dealing with error types. As Ellis (2009) points out, written CFs might be provided as direct, indirect, metalinguistic, focused, unfocused, electronic, or in reformulation. It is studied here whether the learners with direct focused CF end up with better results and work better on the specific errors since they get more evidence about their mistakes and the correct form or not compared to the learners receiving indirect focused CF. This article, in short, shows the results of a study which examined the effectiveness of focusing only on direct focused written CF versus indirect focused written CF in order to see which one is more helpful for EFL learners. The three-month study was carried out with 40 intermediate level high school EFL students at International School of Sarajevo in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The students were asked to produce five different pieces of writing, a pre-test, an immediate post-test and three delayed post-tests, in which they completed stories on a different topic each time in their classroom. The practical use of the focused grammatical structure, both regular and irregular past tense in our case, was the target in the feedback process and the study found that the students who received indirect focused written CF performed better than the other group