Truscott’s Claims in Giving Corrective Feedback: Does it Matter in EFL Writing Context?

Giving Corrective Feedback in students’ writings has got the center of attention in the recent years. The question of whether to give CF to students or not to do so has become a controversial quest. In this research three Truscott’s claims on giving CF were investigated to EFL students’ writing. For the purpose of this investigation Direct Feedback has been used to draw the conclusion on Truscott’s claims. These claims are: (a) correction may have value for non-grammatical errors but not for errors in grammar; (b) students are inclined to avoid more complex constructions due to error correction; and (c) the time spent on CF may be more wisely spent on additional writing practice to improve writing ability. The obtained results indicated that giving CF to students’ grammatical errors has a significant result on their accuracy improvement. The research also showed that students don’t tend to avoid Complex Structures due to the CF provided on these structures. And finally it indicated that in a class without any provided CF and just with doing exercises on a specific subject the accuracy of students decrease during a writing program.


INTRODUCTION
Corrective feedback (CF) is probably the most widely used feedback in second language (L2) classrooms (Van Beuningen, De Jong, and Kuiken; 2011). On the way round, however, as Truscott claimed error correction is necessarily ineffective and potentially harmful (Truscott's, 1996). During 1990s to 2000s, he frequently presented objections with respect to the use of CF in L2 writing classes (Truscott, 1996(Truscott, , 1999(Truscott, , 2004(Truscott, , 2007. Truscott's (1996) statement that CF is ineffective depends on both practical and theoretical arguments. His practical doubts concern to teachers' capacities in providing adequate and consistent feedback and to learners' ability and willingness to use the feedback effectively. His theoretical argument grounds on the claim that CF overlooks important insights from second language acquisition (SLA) theories, including (a) the gradual and complex nature of inter language development, which stands in stark contrast to error correction as a simple transfer of information; (b) the impossibility for any single form of CF to be effective across the very differently acquired domains of morphology, syntax, and lexis, particularly with respect to grammatical features that are "integral parts of a complex system" (Truscott, 2007, p. 258) and that would be heedless to change; (c) the likelihood that any proven advantages might be at least related to  Ellis, 2004), but never implicit procedural knowledge, which is all important for acquisition; thus, CF would promote "pseudo learning" or at best self-editing and revision skills, without supporting true accuracy development; and (d) the impracticality of preparing CF to each learner's current level of L2 development, in Pienemann's ( 1998) sense of learner readiness, given that results in this area to date are incomplete and not enough to be useful for teaching practice. In addition to arguing that error correction is ineffective, Truscott (1996Truscott ( , 2004Truscott ( , and 2007) stated that correcting students' writing might be also counterproductive. One of his arguments was that teachers run the risk of making their students avoid more complex structures when they emphasize learners' errors by providing CF. Truscott logic was that it is the immediate goal of error correction to make learners aware of the errors they committed and that this awareness creates a motivation for students to avoid the corrected constructions in future writing (Truscott, 2007). Second, Truscott (1996Truscott ( , 2004 claimed that CF is a waste of time and suggested that the energy spent on dealing with corrections-both by teachers and students-could be allocated more ability to alter native activities, such as additional writing practice. According to what has been mentioned, Truscott (1996) convened the desertion of CF from L2 writing classes, until its usefulness had been proven by empirical research (Truscott, 1999(Truscott, , 2004(Truscott, , 2007. Although Ferris (1999Ferris ( , 2002Ferris ( , and 2004) made a stand for the use of written CF and argued that Truscott's conclusions were hasty, she agreed that evidence from welldesigned studies was necessary before any stable conclusions could be drawn about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of error correction.
Framed within a cognitive perspective of L2 acquisition, the present study investigates on the effects of direct CF in an EFL situation to survey Truscott's claims. For this purpose three control groups and three treatment groups in accordance with Truscott's three claims have been used, which involve pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest has been involved in the study.

Review of Literature
The review of the previous study in Corrective Feedback has indicated that there is an increasing interest in doing research in this field and it shows that the subject has found the center of current researches. For this reason, the review of literature of the current study has been divided into four parts: the first part is discussing the researches that showed the effectiveness of Witten CF, the second part is all about the relative effectiveness of Direct and Indirect CF, the third part is unraveling the CF researches in relation with different error types, and the fourth part is conferring about the harmful part of giving CF effect.

The effectiveness of Witten CF
Early empirical work on the effects of CF on L2 learners' writing can be categorized in two ways: a set of studies that focused on the role of CF during the revision process and a second group of investigations that set out to answer the question of whether correction produces a learning effect when new pieces of writing are inspected. The revision studies showed that language students were able to improve the accuracy of a particular piece of writing, based on the feedback provided (e.g., Ashwell, 2000;Fathman & Whalley, 1990;Ferris, 1997;Ferris & Roberts, 2001). These results thus showed that CF is a useful editing tool. However, as Truscott and Hsu (2008) have rightly argued, these results do not constitute evidence of learning, as only two versions of the same draft were compared. It thus remained unclear if students' success in using the feedback during revision would subsequently lead to International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 8 9 acquisition of the corrected forms. One might also think that practice with autonomous selfediting of texts might be a better use of instructional time, if CF is really only beneficial as an editing tool. If one believes that editing is the only source of benefit of CF, teachers might simply spend more instructional time in class encouraging the honing of self-editing skills.
The recognition that a focus on grammar learning benefits rather than on revision skills is needed has led the way into a growing body of tightly controlled investigations that has begun to explore the long term effects of CF on L2 writing by comparing learners' accuracy performance on pretests and (delayed) posttests. Following the methodology of oral feedback research (e.g., Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006;Lyster, 2004), the majority of these researchers (e.g., Bitchener, 2008;Bitchener & Knoch, 2008, 2010a, 2010bEllis, Sheen, Murakami, & Takashima, 2008;Sheen, 2007Sheen, , 2010 have chosen to investigate the effects of focused correction, whereby CF only targets one persistently problematic error type at a time (e.g., errors in the use of English articles).
The logic behind this focused approach is that learners might be more likely to notice and understand corrections when just one feature is targeted (Ellis et al., 2008), particularly considering a limited processing capacity model of L2 acquisition (Bitchener, 2008;Sheen, 2007). The extant findings thus far consistently point at strong and durable positive effects of focused CF on learners' accuracy development (Xu, 2009).
By comparison, evidence on the language learning potential of unfocused CF, which involves comprehensive correction of every error in students' writing, is scarce. As far as it concerns, only four studies have investigated whether comprehensive CF yields a learning effect. Two of them ( Ellis et al. (2008) found accuracy gains for both their focused and comprehensive CF groups and thus concluded both are equally effective. However, some methodological weaknesses of the study have been discussed by Xu (2009) and, as the authors themselves acknowledged, students in the focused CF group received more feedback on the target feature (i.e., English articles) than students in the comprehensive CF group. Sheen et al. (2009), on the other hand, found the focused approach to be more helpful than provision of comprehensive feedback when both were compared to the control group. However, the authors pointed out that the correction received by the comprehensive CF group was rather unsystematic in nature; although some errors were corrected, others were ignored. It is conceivable that this unsystematic way of correcting negatively influenced the effect of comprehensive CF in this study. More evidence on the potentially differential value of focused versus comprehensive CF would be most welcome, not only because of the discrepant results reviewed here but also because the issue of relative effectiveness is particularly relevant for teaching practice, given that both might be valuable feedback methodologies indifferent ways.
However, the argument of the importance of producing more evidence about the singular contribution of unfocused or comprehensive CF on the accuracy of new pieces of writing is showing considerable significance. For one, and notwithstanding the important contribution of the focused CF work to the error correction debate, the implications that can be drawn from focused CF studies so far are rather limited, because the targeted linguistic features (i.e., English articles) are typically selected for maximal simplicity (Ferris, 2010;Truscott, 2010). Xu (2009) also noted that such a clear focus on just one or two grammatical structures may lead students to consciously monitor the use of that target feature when performing on the posttest(s).

2. The Relative Effectiveness of Direct and Indirect CF
Corrective feedback researchers have not only shown interest in the question of whether correction should be comprehensive or selective in nature. Many studies have also addressed "how" questions, exploring the relative effectiveness of different ways to deliver CF, or CF types. Most of these studies have categorized their CF methodologies as either direct or indirect (Van Beuningen et al, 2011). Whereas direct CF consists of an indication of the error and provision of the corresponding correct L2 form, indirect CF only indicates that an error has been made.
Indirect correction methods can take different forms that vary in their explicitness (e.g., underlining of errors, coding of errors). What they share in common is that instead of the teacher providing the target form, it is left to the learner to correct his/her own errors (Van Beuningen et al, 2011).
Clear empirical evidence on the differential effects of direct and indirect CF on accuracy development is lacking, as research on the issue has produced controversial results. Some researchers have found no differences between the two CF types (Frantzen, 1995; Robb, Ross, & Shortreed, 1986), others have reported an advantage for indirect CF (Ferris, 2006;Lalande, 1982), and yet others have found direct correction to be most effective in t heir comparisons (Bitchener & Knoch, 2010b;Chandler, 2003;Van Beuningen et al., 2008). Problems of interpretation make these contradictory results, however. Some of the studies were not designed to compare the two CF methodologies, and in other studies, the using of direct and indirect CF as distinct treatments was not rigorous enough. Additionally, caution must be exercised when results are proclaimed on descriptive results versus statistical significance tests and on comparisons against the other treatment versus the control group (Van Beuningen et al, 2011).
Bitchener and Knoch (2010b) reported a statistically significance difference between direct and indirect CF, found the advantage to be in favor of the direct approach. However, the findings between the two studies are not directly comparable, as the former investigated (direct and indirect) comprehensive CF and the latter investigated (direct and indirect) focused CF.

3. CF and Different Types of Error
Truscott (2007) explained that his case against CF (Truscott, 1996(Truscott, , 1999 was actually a case against grammar correction. He claimed that syntactic errors in particular might not be amenable to correction, because they are integral parts of a complex system that-in Truscott's view-is impermeable to CF (Van Beuningen et al, 2011). He further more suggested that morphological features are evenly unlikely to take advantage from CF because their acquisition not only depends on the understanding of form but also of meaning and use in relation to other words and portions of the language system. Truscott (2001Truscott ( , 2007

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 8
She found that students receiving CF only experienced a significant reduction from pretest to posttest in verb errors. Lalande (1982) distinguished 12 error types and observed that correction only led to a significant decrease in orthographical errors. Bitchener et al. (2005) investigated how focused CF impacted learners' accuracy development on three target structures and found that CF had a greater effect on the accuracy of past simple tense and articles than on the correct usage of prepositions. None of these studies, however, could test Truscott's claim that grammar correction is ineffective, because they were not set out by design to investigate whether CF is more advantageous for non-grammatical error types than for errors in grammar (Van Beuningen et al, 2011).

4. The Harmful Part of Giving CF
Truscott has argued not only that CF is ineffective but also that it has at least two harmful side effects. One is simplified writing, based on the assumption that CF encourages learners to avoid situations in which they make errors (Van Beuningen et al, 2011). In fact, Truscott (2004Truscott ( , 2007 has argued that accuracy gains found in earlier correction studies might well be attributable to such avoidance and simplified writing instead of CF. His suggestions are in line with limited capacity models of attention t hat also predict a tradeoff between accuracy and complexity (e.g., Skehan, 1998). Within these models, L2 performance is expected to become more complex when learners are willing to experiment with the target language. A focus on accuracy, on the other hand, "is seen to reflect a greater degree of conservatism" in which learners will try "to achieve greater control over more stable elements" while avoiding extending their L2 repertoire (Skehan & Foster, 2001, p. 191).
Few studies have investigated the impact of written CF on linguistic complexity, and, in our opinion, studies that did (Chandler, 2003;Robb et al., 1986;Sheppard, 1992) could not come to any warranted conclusions. Sheppard (1992), for example, reported a negative effect of CF on the structural complexity of learners' writing, but in fact his finding was nonsignificant. Robb et al. (1986) found that CF had a significant positive effect on written complexity, but they did not include a control group without Corrective Feedback.
The same holds for Chandler (2003), who did not find any effect of CF on the complexity of students' writing. An additional problem with the latter study is that Chandler based her conclusion on holistic ratings of text quality. In our view, however, the fact that holistic ratings did not change does not necessarily prove that the linguistic complexity of learners' writing did not change either.
The second harmful side effect of CF identified by Truscott (1996Truscott ( , 2004 was the diversion of time and energy away from more productive aspects of writing instruction, such as sheer writing practice (Van Beuningen et al, 2011). The only study that has directly tested this claim by comparing the effects of CF to those of writing practice is an investigation by Sheen et al. (2009). Their results opposed Truscott's claim by showing that learners did not benefit more from writing practice than from CF.

1. Research Questions
As it was stated earlier Truscott has three claims on giving CF to student's witting that were mentioned as follow: (A) Correction may have value for non-grammatical errors but not for grammatical errors Volume 8 (B) Students are inclined to avoid more complex constructions due to CF (C) The time spent on CF may be wisely spent on additional writing practice to improve writing ability Based on these claims, this research has been investigating on the following three research questions: (A) Does using CF for EFL students in their writing improve their grammatical accuracy? (B) Does giving CF to EFL students in their writing avoid them to use complex constructions? (C) Can the time spend on CF improve writing if wisely spent on additional writing practice?

Participant
In the February the first, 100 advanced students in English all male and with age range from 16 to 20 were chosen to participate in this experimental research. They enrolled as Winter English Program in Academic Language Center Institute. According to the prior Placement Test which had been given to the students, the exact proficiency level of them was cleared. To instruct students, five English teachers were chosen to work with the policy of this research study. In the registration stage, students were informed that in winter semester writing skills had got an extended attention. The course took two months and students attended 18 sessions, and two sessions in each week. The 100 selected students were divided into five classes in each 20 students were attending. These five classes were designed to investigate Truscott's three claims in giving CF to EFL students' writing. The total purpose of the current research was to investigate these claims in EFL situation.

3. Materials
In this research a pretest, immediate posttest, delayed posttest was run. In so doing, there needed three piece of writing. The subject of these researches was based fundamentally on Truscott's claims. For the first claim: Correction may have value for non-grammatical errors but not for grammatical errors, the correct use of verb pattern after model verbs, so students were required to write a paragraph of 200 words about the next summer trip, where will they want to go? And what will they want to do? The next claims: Students are inclined to avoid more complex constructions due to CF and for investigating this claim, students first were under instruction in Compound Sentences in English and then students were required to use this structure in their writing about a memory. According to this claim of Truscott students avoid the complex structures and by using compound sentence structures we wanted to test this claim. For this claim, during the pretest and immediate post test students were under feedback in compound sentences but this instruction were stopped during the immediate posttest and delayed post test for investigating the impact of CF on whether or not avoid students to use complex structures when they were given CF. The third claim: The time spend on CF may be wisely spent on additional writing practice to improve writing ability students in one of chosen classes were just under doing exercises in correct verb pattern after model verbs without any CF in verb pattern after model verbs and then they were compared with the first class, the class which was given CF in correct verb pattern after model verbs to see the aspects of this claim.

R E T R
International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 8

4. Procedure
After 100 students were enrolled in Winter English Program, they were divided into five classes to survey Truscott's claims. For the reason of clear categorization, the procedure part was divided into three parts.

4. 1. Claim One
Correction may have value for non-grammatical errors but not for grammatical errors: 40 out of 100 students were divided into two classes. Class A were going under giving CF in correct verb patterns after model verbs and Class B without giving CF in verb patterns after model verbs. for so doing, in the second session the pretest was held and in the third session the students' writings were backed to them and in 40 minutes the instructor was giving CF in correct verb patterns after model verbs and afterward the immediate posttest was held. It should be stated that when students were enrolling they had been informed of the fact that in the second session they were going to write their first writing as a kind of test.
During the second week, immediate posttest, and the eighth week, the delayed posttest, the instructor was giving No CF on correct verb patterns after model verbs. In Class B the procedure was the same except for the CF giving. In Class B there was No CF in correct verb patterns after model verbs for students so after their first writing in the second session in the third session the instructor of the class returned back without any CF and the immediate posttest was held. There was also delayed posttest was held in the eighth week.

4. Claim Two
Students are inclined to avoid more complex constructions due to giving CF: another 40 out of 100 students were divided into; Class C provided CF in complex structures and Class D without giving CF in complex structures. For testing this claim English Compound Sentences was instructed in both C and D Classes. Compound sentences of English as the name speaks for itself are kind of English sentences that combined two independent sentences. They are always hard for students to use them because of the complexity involved. In the Class C, the giving CF Class in compound sentences was instructed on compound sentences for two weeks of the course period in four sessions. Then in the sixth session the pretest was run. In the seventh session the instructor came back with the provided CF on compound sentences for students.
They studied the feedback for 40 minutes and then the immediate posttest was held. Then in the last session the delayed posttest was held. The important thing here to mention is we used a scale to rate the number of compound sentences used by the students. The scale minimum was one use and the maximum was 20 use of this structure. It should be stated that during the seven sessions in Class D the instruction was given on compound sentences. Then the pretest and immediate posttest were held in the sixth and seventh session respectively. The difference was there was No CF for students before the immediate posttest. In the last session the delayed posttest was run.

4. 3. Claim Three
The time spent on CF may be wisely spent on additional writing practice to improve writing ability: the 20 students were placed in Class E in which the students just did exercises on correct verb patterns after model verbs. In the second session the pretest was held. In the third session the teacher came back but without any feedback and immediate posttest was held. During the fourth session to the last session in which the delayed posttest was run the students Volume 8 just did exercise and there wasn't any provided corrective feedback by the instructor. In the sixteenth session the delayed posttest was run. Class E was in compared with Class A, the one with CF on correct verb patterns after model verbs, which discussed earlier.

RESULT
After information gathered from the five classes during the two months, the following findings were emerged. Once again for the purpose of clear categorization we divided the result section into three parts and in each part we investigated one of the research questions.

1. Claim One: Correction may have value for non-grammatical errors but not for grammatical errors.
For testing this claim, we gathered the data in Class A in which CF was imposed on verb patterns after model verbs and Class B in which there was No CF on verb patterns after model verbs. The descriptive statistics of these two classes were shown in Table 1. By analyzing the means score, some interesting findings will revel. it is obvious that only Class A which was under the impact of giving CF in correct verb pattern after model verbs improve its mean accuracy at the time of the immediate posttest and in the delayed posttest. It is something from 62.80 in the pretest to 69.10 in the delayed posttest. The 6.3 means score increasing clearly shows the impact of giving CF in improving students' accuracy in correct verb pattern after model verbs. On the other hand, in Class B in which there was No CF on correct verb pattern after model verbs the means score decreased from 59.70 in the pretest to 53 in the delayed post test. The 6.70 amount of decreasing indicates that not giving CF to students on correct verb pattern after model verbs caused them to lose their accuracy in this field. The p=.049 for the Class A that showed the effective of giving CF in Writing Class in comparison with p=.52 of Class B, so the hypotheses is confirmed that giving CF to students' grammatical errors is significant. Fig. 1. and Fig. 2 also provide a visual representation of Means score of Class A and Class B during the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest.
International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 8 Fig. 1 illustrates that the means score of Class A and students' accuracy increase during the immediate posttest and delayed posttest which is due to the giving of CF on correct verb pattern after model verbs in the immediate posttest.
All in all and based on the data achieved the first claim is going under question because it shows that giving CF in grammatical errors improve student's accuracy in their writings. So the answer to the first research question is confirmed that giving CF improve their grammatical accuracy. Fig. 2 shows the means score of Class B and students' accuracy decrease dramatically in the delayed posttest. Table 2 is a manifestation of the descriptive statistics of the Class C and Class D. As it was stated earlier Class C was going under giving CF in compound sentences of English in order to find out whether or not giving CF caused students' to avoid or not to avoid complex structures.

2. Students are inclined to avoid more complex constructions due to giving CF
Volume 8 By analyzing the means score, it is cleared that Class C means score of using compound sentences in immediate posttest was 8.30 the time when the instructor gave CF on this complex structure, but as soon as the feedback stopped during the immediate posttest and delayed posttest the means score of using compound sentences was starting to decline. This finding from one side and from the other side the decreasing means score in Class D from 7.25 in pretest to 4.85 in the delayed posttest showed that not only giving CF doesn't decrease the number of using compound sentences but also giving CF increase it as it cleared in the immediate posttest of Class A. Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 also provide a visual representation of Means score of Class C and Class D during the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest.
Volume 8 Fig. 3 shows that in the moment of giving CF on compound sentences the mean score increased to 8.30 but afterward when CF was stopped the mean score is starting to decrease and finally in the delayed posttest it reached 7.50, yet .05 more than the pretest at the beginning of the program. Fig.4. devoted to the means score of Class D in which students weren't given CF in compound sentences. It shows that the means score decrease during the pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest. The second research question isn't clear. Albeit we have seen means score increasing in Class C in the immediate posttest and decrease in means score in Class D during the entire of the program, there should be more experiments and research to reach a stable answer.

Claim Three: The time spent on CF may be wisely spent on additional writing practice to improve writing ability.
For testing the final claim we compared the descriptive statistics of Class E in which students did just practice excursuses on correct verb patterns after model verbs and Class A in which students were given CF on correct verb patterns after model verbs. Table.3. shows this comparison. The means score of Class E decreased during the program, in the immediate posttest it's 59.40 while in the delayed posttest it's 57. 30. On the other hand, the mean score in the Class A increase from 68.30 in the immediate posttest to 69.10 in the delayed posttest. The results shows that giving CF on correct verb patterns after model verbs has a better effect than just do exercises on correct verb patterns after model verbs. The p = .52 for Class E showed the rejection of the hypotheses that spending time on doing exercises may improve the students' writing ability much more than giving CF. on the other hand, p = .049 of Class A confirmed again that giving CF has significant effect on students' writing accuracy. Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 also provide a visual representation of Means score of Class A and Class E during the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest. Fig. 5 illustrates that the means score of Class A and students' accuracy increase during the immediate posttest and delayed posttest which is due to the giving of CF on correct verb pattern after model verbs in the immediate posttest. Fig. 6 shows that the means score of Class E decrease during the immediate posttest and in the delayed posttest. It shows that the claim that not giving CF and just do exercise is all due to question. The findings indicate that the third research question is not confirmed and there should be amount of CF in writing Classes and just doing exercises in the class isn't enough.
It was found that unlike what Truscott claimed about giving CF to grammatical errors that would be useless, it is not and surely giving CF to students' grammatical errors will improve their accuracy in their writings. The research also indicated that as far as teachers give CF on complex structures like compound sentences the students not only don't inclined to avoid but also they inclined to use these structure much more in the moment of giving CF. On one another perspective the results show that in comparison with giving CF to a grammatical point, doing just exercises on a specific grammatical point has less effect. So the claim that the time spent on CF may be wisely spent on additional writing practice to improve writing ability is due to big doubt.
Overall, the results show that students can be able to make benefit from the CF in the writing classrooms. This CF may be imposed on grammatical errors or non-grammatical errors (Bitchener, 2008;Sheen, 2007). It is important to note that in this study we worked on EFL students and further research may be required to other situation. The students involved in this research study were all advanced in English proficiency and there also required other level of proficiency to work on in order to see the result on them. The grammatical point is also restricted in this research study. We make used of correct verb patterns after model verbs and other researches may benefit from other grammatical points. A pedagogical implication of the findings of the study for giving corrective feedback in EFL contexts is that giving CF provides students with an excellent mean to improve their writing accuracy. For doing this, teachers can give a report on the students writings in which indicate the problematic part for the students.