Revision-mediated and Attention-mediated Feedback: Effects on EFL Learners’ Written Syntactic Accuracy

Based on the literature, revision requirement (i.e., when students rewrite their whole text based on the teacher feedback) can perhaps be a necessary intermediate step towards the development of written accuracy because learners have more time to think about and process the corrections; however, some state drawing learner’s attention can be achieved by asking them to take time to look over the received feedback and carefully examine their errors. This quantitative quasi-experimental study, which followed a pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest design, investigated the effects of revision mediation versus attention mediation on EFL learners’ syntactic accuracy of their argumentative essays. 83 Iranian EFL learners, studying at upper-intermediate level were assigned to three groups: comprehensive direct corrective feedback plus a revision requirement (DCF/+R), comprehensive DCF plus a time to pay careful attention to and study the errors and received feedback (DCF/+S) and the control group that received the comprehensive DCF without any extra assignment (DCF/-R,-S). Each group received three sessions of treatment. The existence of any statistically significant differences among the three groups with regard to each received treatment was investigated both in the short and long term. It was found that both revision requirement (DCF/+R) and careful attention requirement (DCF/+S) significantly outperformed the group that only received the feedback. Nevertheless, it was also proved that the group that was required to pay careful attention to and study the feedback (DCF/+S) significantly outperformed the one that experienced the revision requirement (DCF/+R). Discussion focuses on the importance of two levels of awareness: noticing and understanding