The purpose of this study is to investigate how meta-linguistic feedback provided by teachers in writing affects the accuracy of the writing of Chinese Korean learners with different degrees of proficiency and to examine the effect direction of meta-l...
The purpose of this study is to investigate how meta-linguistic feedback provided by teachers in writing affects the accuracy of the writing of Chinese Korean learners with different degrees of proficiency and to examine the effect direction of meta-linguistic feedback.
Numerous previous studies on feedback have demonstrated that meta-linguistic feedback not only plays an important role in second language acquisition but also improves learners' learning abilities. However, research on meta-linguistic feedback in the field of Korean language education is relatively insufficient. Deliberately addressing this issue, this study attempts to verify the effect of meta-linguistic feedback on the accuracy of the writing of 63 Chinese Korean learners with different proficiency levels who learn Korean for academic purposes.
Participants in the experiment completed a total of four writing tasks on the same topic, submitted them to the teacher, and then received meta-linguistic feedback. The results reveal that the changes in the error rate after providing meta-linguistic feedback were inconsistent among learners with different levels of proficiency. For the beginner group, although there were slight changes in the individual error rates after receiving meta-linguistic feedback, a statistically significant decrease in the average value was not observed. Therefore, it is difficult to say that meta-linguistic feedback had a significant improving effect on the error rate of the beginner group. However, in the cases of the intermediate group and advanced group, the changes in the rate of errors in form after the experiment were statistically significant, and it was confirmed that meta-linguistic feedback improved the writing accuracy of the intermediate and advanced learners. When looking at the error rate changes by error type, both grammar and vocabulary error rates decreased in a statistically significant manner in the intermediate group, while in the advanced group, only the reduction in grammar error rate was statistically significant. Compared with the advanced group, the decreases in error rate and form errors in the intermediate group were more pronounced.
As described above, this study shows that meta-linguistic feedback has a positive effect on improving learner writing accuracy and the effect of meta-linguistic feedback on improving writing accuracy is closely related to learners proficiency. Among the studies on the effectiveness of feedback, this article is the first to investigate the effect of meta-linguistic feedback on the writing accuracy of learners with different proficiency, and the results can guide the efforts to provide feedback for students with different proficiency levels in real teaching situations. It is expected that the findings here would help improve second language education, especially Korean language education, and have reference value for future studies on feedback.