Self-Correction

This study investigated the effectiveness of peer feedback and self-correction based on guideline sheets on the writing ability of the Indonesian EFL students. It involved 71 Indonesian EFL students taking the Essay Writing course at Universitas Negeri Malang, an Indonesian university. The students were from three intact classes and they were given different types of treatment: The students from Class A were given peer feedback based on a guideline sheet, those from Class B were assigned to do self-correction based on a guideline sheet, and those from Class C were involved in a conventional editing process of writing. The results of the study showed that the students given peer feedback based on a guideline sheet (Class A) have better ability in writing essays than those who were not given peer feedback (Class C); the students conducting self-correction based on a guideline sheet (Class B) have better ability in writing essays than those who did not conduct self-correction (Class C); and both peer feedback based on a guideline sheet (given to Class A) and self-correction based on a guideline sheet (given to Class B) significantly improved the ability in writing essays of the students in the two experiemental classes. Given that the two types of treatment were effective in increasing the students " scores in essay writing, peer feedback and self-correction based on guidelines sheets are recommended for practical use in EFL classrooms as well as for further research studies.

Studies in support of the facilitative role of correction in either forms of recast, repetition, confirmations, compression checks, or clarification request abound (Ellis, 2003). Among these studies recast has proved to be the most frequent type of error correction in classroom [30] [32]; however, self-correction or elicitation might make students notice the gap more than recast. To illuminate the difference, two methods of recast and self correction were applied to two groups of students to see if there would be any difference between two methods on the students' writing accuracy regarding the use of past tense. Man Whitney, along with Wilcoxon, was run as the main statistical techniques to examine the effectiveness of methods of error correction on students' writing accuracy. The result of this study showed that there is no significant difference between the two methods of correction although students improve after treatment; however, self correction outperformed recast and recast did not improve students' accuracy in posttest.

During language teaching and learning, the focus is on how correct or wrong the input is reflected in the output. Accuracy first approaches reject errors due to the risk of interference whereas the communicative approaches use them as signs of learning. So, errors play a vital role in foreign language learning. It is viewed as improvement in different language learning approaches. This paper after reviewing the literature about error and error correction in English language teaching examines the types of errors the students can self-correct. The procedure is as follows: Twenty erroneous sentences from examination papers were chosen as student errors and learners were asked to correct any kind of errors in the sentences. The results were categorised, analysed and commented. The results show that students are better at correcting the structural errors and worst in discourse ones. Under these findings, it is suggested that learner training should focus more on contextual learning.