A systematic review of written corrective feedback research in ESL/EFL contexts

In the past decade (2007 – 2017), research on written corrective feedback (WCF) has been proliferating in ESL and EFL contexts and new developments in this field of research are evident. To synthesize the latest advancement in WCF research, a number of review articles have been published in leading journals of TESOL and applied linguistics. Despite identifying some research trends, these reviews tend to focus on a particular research or pedagogical concern related to WCF, and thus, lack the provision of a holistic and systematic understanding of the major findings garnered from the WCF research base. In this connection, there is an impetus to conduct a systematic review of recent literature on WCF to identify current research trends and provide an agenda for future WCF studies. This article is divided into two parts: in the first part, content analysis was conducted on abstracts of 41 WCF primary studies published between 1997 and 2017 in SSCI-indexed journals in the fields of TESOL, language learning, and language education using a text-mining tool called Leximancer. 22 word-level concepts were identified which were grouped into five themes. Based on the systematic review, two research tasks are identified to provide an agenda for future research.