The Role of Metalinguistic Explanation and Indirect Corrective Feedback in Discourse Aspects in Argumentative Writing

This study investigated the teachers’ provision of indirect versus metalinguistic error correction to EFL learners committed errors in their argumentative writing pieces. The discourse aspects that were the focus of this research include: unity, organization, cohesion, coherence and metadiscourse. For this purpose, six intact classes were selected where two classes received indirect correction, the other two were exposed to metalinguistic correction and two other classes functioned as the control group where there was no correction at all. Pre- and post-tests in terms of argumentative writing tasks were analyzed. The results of statistical analysis revealed a non-significant difference between the indirect and metalinguistic feedback types regarding organization. However, all the other comparisons were found to be statistically significant where the indirect feedback outperformed the metalinguistic feedback, and both proved more fruitful than the control group. Additionally, on the whole, teachers were more inclined towards indirect corrective feedback compared to metalinguistic feedback in addressing learners’ discourse problems. The teachers gave more comments to identify problems instead of providing corrections and suggestions.