In the case of direct corrective feedback, the teacher provides the correct form to the students, which is ideal and convenient for students who have low level of language proficiency and those who are unable to self-correct as well as do not know what the correct form is. Various forms includes: (1) crossing out unnecessary words (when the teacher omits any wrong addition from students’ original texts, phrase or morpheme), (2) inserting a missing word, phrase or morpheme (when the teacher adds any missing items on students’ original texts) and (3) writing the
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correct form above or near to the erroneous form (when the teacher rewrites a word, phrase or a sentence, providing he correct spelling, structure or form on students’
original texts) (Ferris, 2006). Direct corrective feedback can cover a variety of problems in students’ texts. It is beneficial in a way that it provides students with explicit guidance about how to correct their mistakes. Moreover, Bitchener and Ferris (2012) also pointed out that direct corrective feedback tries to help students make changes in their writing and improve their writing performance in future tasks. Ferris and Roberts (2001) also revealed that it is beneficial in solving errors of prepositions as well as other issues related to lexical level. Furthermore, she concluded that it is also effective in the end of the writing process to help students concentrate on the remaining errors in their texts and improve their future writing.
To some extents, Shintani and Ellis (2013) expressed that direct corrective feedback is more likely to support learning when students have low knowledge competence of a grammatical structures. They concluded that based on direct correction, students are able to remember longer grammatical features in at sentential level, thus, avoid making the same mistakes in future performance. Also, Chandler (2003) discussed that direct corrective feedback enables students to perceive the correct form immediately while indirect corrective feedback does not show students about the accuracy of their hypothesized corrections. This is suitable in case of students have limited or poor writing competence. With explicit corrective feedback, teachers can simply indicate that an error has been made or they can give metalinguistic feedback in details (Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006).
With explicit corrective feedback, students have an opportunity to understand what specific errors should be corrected.
Explicit corrective feedback has widely been examined in numerous studies.
Sheen (2007), in a recent study, revealed that direct corrective feedback may be practical and helpful in promoting students’ acquisition of grammatical features in particular. However, Ellis (2009) suggested that direct corrective feedback requires minimal practicing from the side of the students, not only from the teachers.
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Therefore, it may not contribute to long term learning process. Yilmaz (2012) tested 48 native students of English who has no Turkey background. Two different types of corrective feedback were employed in this study. The findings showed that explicit feedback outweighed the recast, a type of indirect feedback. In a study, Karim (2013) investigated the effect of both direct and indirect corrective feedback on students’ revision on the same piece of writing. In this study, 53 ESL students at intermediate level were distributed into 4 small groups: direct, underlining, metalinguistic and a control group. Being involved in this study, students were required to write a new writing two weeks later. The findings indicated that group treated with direct corrective feedback outperformed the others in terms of grammatical accuracy.
2.4.1.2 Implicit / Indirect Corrective Feedback
Whereas explicit corrective feedback refers to teacher’ direct provision of correction to their students’ products, implicit corrective feedback involves the fact that the students have made an error but without actually correcting it. Many researchers viewed indirect corrective feedback in various ways. Ellis (2008) suggested that indirect corrective feedback emphasizes the role of students in understanding and correcting their errors rather than being provided with the corrections. According to Ferris and Roberts (2001), indirect corrective feedback is a feedback strategy that indicates the existence of errors without providing the correct form. In this type, teachers do not provide the students with the correction.
Instead, they only provide indications that make students aware about their errors.
For example, teachers provide students with general clues about the location where errors are and type of errors by using lines, circles, codes, marks, highlights or cursors to point out omissions in students’ text (O’Sullivan & Chambers, 2006).
Moreover, teachers can put a cross in the margin next to the line that includes an error (Talatifard, 2016). Additionally, Elashri (2013) divided indirect feedback into two sub-types, including coded and uncoded. Regarding the coded indirect feedback, the teacher underlines the errors and then writes symbols above those
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errors. After that, the composition is given to the students to be corrected because those symbols motivate them to think about how those errors have to be replaced.
Meanwhile, as for uncoded indirect feedback, the teacher underlines or circles the errors instead of writing symbols above them. By this way, the students are forced to identify the existence of errors themselves and brainstorm the way how to correct them.
Additionally, Bitchener and Knoch (2008) agreed that the indirect feedback is beneficial for upgrading long term acquisition because students in this case are cognitively challenged to correct the errors based on their acquired knowledge.
Hence, this type of feedback helps increase students’ engagement and attention to forms. As a result, it helps promote students’ problem-solving skills capacity as well. In a study, moreover, Moser and Jasmine’s (2010) appreciated the benefits of this type. They revealed that students whose writing assignments were indirectly corrected error codes achieved remarkably better gain than those who were directly corrected in their essay revision by the teacher. On the other hand, Srichanyachon (2012) argued that students with low level of writing proficiency may find it difficult to identify and correct errors even when they can notice location of errors.