The Effect of Immediate and Delayed Error Correction on Accuracy Development of Intermediate EFL Learners’ Writing

Abstract

This study investigated the immediate and delayed effects of error correction on the accuracy improvement of intermediate EFL learners’ writing. Through TOEFL test, the researcher selected 3 intact intermediate classes and assigned them into peer correction, self-correction and teacher correction groups. Before the main treatment, all participants were requested to write a composition on a topic, which served the purpose of pre-test. After writing the composition, the first group (peer), including two learners in each group, corrected the errors underlined by the teacher together. The learners in the second group, namely, self-correction, corrected the errors underlined by teacher individually and the third group received the correct forms written by the teacher on top of the errors. All the groups wrote 6 compositions on the topics during 6 sessions. The first topic served the purpose of immediate pre-test. This procedure was followed for 6 weeks and the 6th composition was regarded as immediate post-test and after a month (12th week), delayed post-test was conducted for all learners. The findings of ANOVA indicated that both peer correction and self-correction were influential in enhancing learners' writing accuracy; however, the group doing peer correction outperformed the self-correction one.