Effects of L1 on Corrective Feedback with L2 Academic Writing

This study examined the effects of first language on academic writing with L1 and L2 feedback in Korean students' academic writings in English in order to suggest the way to develop the students' textual knowledge in English writing and to improve lexical accuracy. Sixty university students in Korea were used as the study participants (n=60) and were asked to write an English academic topic paper, and they were randomly divided into two groups: writing ideas in L1 with L1 feedback and translating them into L2 (experimental group (n=30)) and writing directly in L2 with L2 feedback (control group (n=30)). Eight participants were interviewed to find the effectiveness of the feedback in both groups in L2 writing. The results of the study showed: (1) The experimental group's participants got a little higher writing score than the control group's students, having more error-free sentences and diverse word uses. (2) The control group' students tended to seek the word-for-word correspondence while conveying their ideas into L2 simultaneously, having text-cohesion problems; however, the experimental group's students dealt with meaning-for-meaning correspondence with diverse word use, forming their ideas in L1 concretely after getting L1 feedback. The result of this study provided an implication that employing L2 meaning formation and textual organization in L1 with L1 feedback can help EFL students in Korea to facilitate their L2 lexical and rhetorical knowledge into unfamiliar L2 academic writing effectively.