Written corrective feedback (WCF) has been increasingly attracting researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) as well as second language (L2) writing practitioners. Bitchener and Storch, two renowned WCF researchers, define WCF as “a written response to a linguistic error that has been made in the writing of a text by an L2 learner” (p. 1). This increasing interest in WCF is understandable because the implementation of WCF is time-consuming as well as pedagogically imperative. However, it is widely known that learners keep making the same error, and thus teachers’ efforts do not pay off easily. Therefore, with the increasing number of published research, it is beneficial to review studies about WCF to synthesize findings and identify issues to guide future research. To this end, Written Corrective Feedback for L2 Development comprehensively reviews WCF studies, especially those conducted under cognitive and sociocultural perspectives, the two major driving forces in this domain.

This study addresses several challenges in written corrective feedback (WCF) research. First, scholars have expressed concerns that although studies of focused WCF may benefit some classrooms and may help advance second language acquisition theory, they may not represent ecologically valid methods where comprehensive feedback may be more appropriate. Second, many focused WCF studies only report on learner performance within a narrow list of linguistic features, making it impossible for others to determine any secondary benefits or detriments of the treatment. Finally, many research studies of WCF have been of limited duration, making it difficult to identify longer-term effects of various WCF methods. Therefore, this study is an attempt to address these issues by examining the effects of dynamic WCF over a 30-week period. In addition to analyzing linguistic accuracy, this study examined the effects of dynamic WCF on rhetorical appropriateness, fluency, complexity, and vocabulary development over a 30- week period. While improvements in linguistic accuracy were observed for the treatment group when compared to a control group, no other differences were found. Implications for pedagogy and future research are discussed.