The Effects of Different Types of Form-Focused Instruction on Korean University Students' Writing Accuracy

The present study investigated what combination of three form-focused options - explicit explanation, production practice, and corrective feedback - may be effective in helping low-proficiency learners improve accuracy in communicative writing. The subjects were 34 Korean university students enrolled in 'Business English 1' and the study lasted 11 weeks. The relative clause structure was selected as the target structure. The study found that the combination of explicit explanation, sentence-level production practice, communicative writing practice, and recasts had a significantly greater effect on improved accuracy than the combination of communicative writing practice and recasts and that of explicit explanation, communicative writing practice, and recasts. Because the second and third combinations didn't lead to significantly improved accuracy, it can be concluded that of the form-focused options forming the first combination sentence-level production practice made a decisive contribution to the significant increase in accuracy. It also found that the provision of self-correcting opportunities before providing recasts on errors committed in sentence-level production practice resulted in significantly greater accuracy in communicative writing than the provision of recasts alone on them. The results of the study suggest that we should make low-proficiency Korean learners have sentence-level production practice which is intensive and focused and make them self-correct targeted errors before providing them with narrowly focused recasts in order to help them to improve writing accuracy.