The studies on error correction have been laying their emphasis on grammatical structures of the language with lack of focus on non-grammatical aspect such as lexical collocation. Therefore, this study aims at investigating the effect of direct and indirect written corrective feedback on low-performing ESL learners. Ninety-two students of a public university involved in the study. Three intact groups that have equal proficiency were identified at the beginning of the university’s academic term. A quasi-experimental design was employed with two experimental groups receiving indirect WCF and direct WCF separately, and a control group deprived of any treatment. The groups were measured in three different time points with pre-test before the intervention, immediate post-test after the intervention, and delayed post-test to measure retention effect. One-way ANOVA and repeated-measures ANOVA were used to measure the effect. The findings reveal that significant differences were detected in immediate post-tests of direct and indirect WCF groups which indicate that both WCF strategies can enhance participants’ collocational competency. Additionally, the findings also show that direct WCF strategy greatly affects participants collocation errors despite both groups performed better than the control group. This study demonstrates that retention effect was detected in the group that received direct WCF while the indirect WCF group was not able to retain - in delayed post-test. Recommendation is also discussed for Future directions of studies.Â

The primary aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of direct and indirect written corrective feedback (WCF) on English collocational competency of high-performing ESL learners. The study also sought to compare possible differences in the effect of two WCF strategies that help the researcher in identifying the appropriate WCF strategy in improving learners’ collocational competency in the context of the study. Additionally, retention effect of WCF is also investigated in delayed post-tests. Eighty-eight high-performing ESL learners of a public university participated in the quasi-experimental study of two experimental groups and one control group. A series of test namely pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test was administered to collect the data. The groups are labelled ‘Direct group’ that received direct WCF treatment (n=33), ‘Indirect group’ that received indirect WCF (n=25), and ‘Control group’ that received no treatment (n=25). A set of collocation test that was developed by Gyllstad (2009) was adopted and a pilot test was conducted prior to the actual study. The participants were tested in three point of time (pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test). The findings indicate that there is a positive effect of direct and indirect WCF strategies on collocational competence. Furthermore, direct WCF has the most effect in improving collocational competency of the participants. Finally, both WCF strategies are proven statistically in retaining their effects as demonstrated in the results of delayed post-test. Suggestion for future studies are also discussed.

Scholars' attention on written corrective feedback especially the direct-indirect dichotomy has been increasing due to inconsistencies in its effects toward L2 learners’ linguistic accuracy. Therefore, this study was performed to provide a literature review of the increasing number of WCF studies that may provide new perspectives for future research on direct-indirect WCF strategies. This study takes a systematic literature approach to synthesize 16 empirical studies that focusing on the effect of direct-indirect WCF from SCOPUS database. The 7-step systematic review process was used as the main approach for this study. 4 research questions were formulated to guide the study. The findings have revealed the sampling features of ESL context, beginner, and advanced proficiency levels of learners are underexplored. Moreover, it is also suggested that future studies incorporate control groups to compare the effects of direct-indirect WCF strategies with non-treatment groups. Methodologically, other research approaches should also be considered by future studies for most of the studies in the review applied experimental approach. In highlighting the targeted linguistic structures, this study has found the focus of studies in the review as mostly emphasizing on grammatical aspect, thus suggesting for more WCF studies on non-grammatical aspects. Finally, the overall effect suggests that indirect WCF was effective on both grammatical and non-grammatical structures whereas direct WCF was mostly effective on non-grammatical structures.