The effect of adding supplementary writing to an extensive reading program.

It was observed that the rate of summary submission for the Correction group decreased from 60% to 30% towards the end of the study even though all students in the Correction group agreed to correct their papers and hand in revisions. The rate of summary submission for the other two groups also decreased about the same amount.

4. DISCUSSION

All three groups in this study improved significantly, but there were no significant differences among the groups in gains. The group that wrote summaries in Japanese, their first language, was the most efficient, making the greatest gains in terms of points gained for the time devoted to English.

As noted earlier, those who wrote English summaries said that they desired this kind of supplementation before the treatment began. When the treatment was over, most students in these groups still felt that summary writing was helpful (table 12). But a large percentage felt that writing summaries hindered their reading, that it was tiring, and about two-thirds of the English summary writers admitted that they sometimes copied part of their summary. All groups, including those who wrote summaries in Japanese, handed in fewer summaries as the treatment progressed.

These results do not definitely demonstrate that output and output plus correction are always ineffective. It is of course possible that there simply wasn't enough output or correction or that the means employed were not optimal.

It may be the case that output must be "comprehensible output" (Swain, 1985; but see Krashen, 2003), done in a way to encourage feedback on meaning. According to the Comprehensible Output hypothesis, output helps language acquisition when listeners or readers fail to understand the message, forcing the language acquirer to try again, with an improved version. This kind of communicative pressure was not employed in this study. It may be the case that the correction done needed to be more "selective, prioritized, and clear" (Ferris, 1999; but see Truscott, 1999), that is, focused on certain rules, with some corrections given higher priority, and done in a way that makes it obvious what the problem is and what needs to be done to repair the error. In this study, correction was, at times, confined to only pointing out that an error was made, and at other times included the correct form. Correction was quite consistent, but was not directed at certain points of grammar to the exclusion of other points.