Effects of direct focused feedback and no feedback on run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and noun-pronoun agreement errors of EFL tertiary students

Abstract

This quasi-experimental study set out to explore the effects of direct focused feedback and no feedback on run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and noun-pronoun agreement errors in A2 writing tasks of EFL students at Universidad de Cuenca, Ecuador. The study comprised 39 participants divided into a treatment (n=20) and control group (n=19). The feedback strategies were applied on 6 different tasks, and the first and last task were used as the pre- and posttest, respectively. After tallying the number of errors in the pre- and posttest, a statistical analysis was run. The results indicated that direct focused feedback, unlike the control group, produced significant changes in terms of run-on sentences and sentence fragments.