Written Corrective Feedback: English as a Foreign Language

In this article (The effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback in an English as a foreign language context) there are many different opinions regarding the efficacy of written corrective feedback. Truscott reflecting the views of teachers who adhere to process theories of writing , advanced the strong claim that correcting learner's errors in a written composition may enable them to remove the errors in a subsequent draft but has no effect on grammatical accuracy in a new piece of writing. While Ferris disputed his claim, she said if the correction was clear it would work.
Truscott claimed that Ferris failed to cite any evidence to support her contention. Bitchener and Knoch reviewed number of studies that have investigated the effects of written CF. They divided the studies into with and without control group. All the studies without the control group reported improvement in grammatical accuracy following corrective feedback but as Truscott claimed such studies cannot be used that CF is really effective. Reviewing the literature relating to this controversy Hyland and Hyland commented it is difficult to draw any clear conclusions and generalizations from the literature as a result of varied populations, treatment and research design.
Therefore this study examines if does written CF help Japanese learners of English to become more accurate in the use of the English indefinite and definite articles to express first and second mention? and if is there a difference in the effect of unfocused and focused CF directed at using the indefinite articles to express first and second mention? The target structure in this article is the effect of CF on L2 learners' use of articles therefore this study used a quasi-experimental design involving two experimental groups(focused and unfocused CF) plus a control group. The three groups completed a pre test, an immediate and delayed post test. All the tests involved narrative writing based on picture