An Examination of Effective lnstructional Strategies for EFL Compositions by Japanese EFL University Students : An Exploratory Study

The effectiveness of feedback to improve EFL students' writing skills is the subject of intense debate (Ferris，2004; Truscott，2007).The current study concerns the effectiveness of written feedback in the development of the correct selection of articles. Two groups of students received feedback on their written assignments. The first was a class of nine Japanese EFL students who received grammatical feedback and feedback on content，to weekly essays which had been set for homework. The second group consisted of two students who completed emailed diary entries in English and received feedback from the teacher in the form of replies and not on grammar. Although the feedback concerned general areas of grammar and content，the focus of this study is limited to progress in the correct choice of articles. Neither study demonstrated an improvement in this respect apart from one student in the second group who only received feedback on content. This suggests that unfocused feedback has little influence on the correct choice of articles. Further study could investigate the effectiveness of focused corrective feedback, as has been successfully demonstrated by Ellis at al. (2008)，and supplemented with written and oral meta-linguistic explanations， as has been suggested by Bitchener (2008)