Using Written Corrective Feedback to Eliminate Japanese University Students’ Use of Sentence-initial Conjunctions

This paper examines the effect of written corrective feedback (WCF) on eliminating sentence-initial conjunctions (SICs) from paragraphs written by Japanese university students in an English as a foreign language course. Research has shown that East Asian learners tend to overuse SICs, and the paper first discusses possible motivations for doing so. The paper then addresses WCF, analyzing the arguments for and against it while providing a taxonomy of the four major types, along with studies that support each type. The paper subsequently presents a study in which 28 first-year Japanese students completed two writing assignments while receiving a sequence of different types of WCF, along with a grammar intervention, in attempts to eliminate SICs from their work. The results showed that error rates only minimally decreased when students were provided a grammar intervention or WCF that did not include the target structure. It was only when the instructor provided WCF for the target structure that the error rates plummeted to nearly zero. In the following discussion, the researcher concludes that process writing can significantly reduce specific grammatical errors, but only if students receive WCF that addresses these errors at some point in their learning.