The Effects of Direct and Indirect Error CorrectionFeedback and Students? Attitudes on The Quality of Junior High School Students? Paragraph Writing

This study was in the secondary school context in Indonesia. English is a compulsory subject in secondary school and taught as a foreign language (EFL) in Indonesia. Improving students writing ability is still a big problem for teachers. Teachers had to find the best way to improve students writing ability. Instead of ongoing controversy on the effectiveness of error correction by some researchers (Kepner, 1991, Truscott, 1999), this study was designed to investigate two types of written error correction feedback (direct versus indirect) and two types of students attitudes (positive versus negative) on students paragraph writing quality. Quality of paragraph writing was defined as the degree to which students paragraph writing met the acceptable characteristics of a good writing in term of contents, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics. Seventy two secondary school students were involved in the research to write and revise paragraphs. In the direct error correction feedback condition, errors made by students were corrected and the right forms were provided by teacher next to or above the original errors. Students rewrote the drafts to make revision of the paragraphs. In the indirect error correction feedback condition, errors made by students were underlined and given codes by teacher. Students make revision of the paragraphs based on teachers feedback given. The research data were collected through pre-test and post-test and analyzed using analysis of variants through SPSS 20.0 Windows program. Results indicated that the group receiving indirect feedback performed significantly better than the group receiving direct feedback on the quality of their writing. The results also revealed that students having positive attitude toward English lesson outperformed those having negative one. Possible reasons for these findings and suggestions for future research were discussed.