Abstract
This study investigates the effect of teacher’s written corrective feedback (WCF) on acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of simple past tense by language learners. Eighty-seven Iranian beginner learners of English participated in this study. The participants were randomly assigned to three groups: focused direct WCF, focused indirect WCF, and control groups. The participants completed text summary tasks. They also took placement test, pretest narrative writing task, text summary tasks, pretest and posttest untimed grammaticality judgment test, metalinguistic test, and timed grammaticality judgment test. The results of the data analysis showed the positive effect of WCF on acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of simple past tense by Iranian beginner learners of English in an English as a foreign language classroom context. However, the findings of the study should be interpreted cautiously due to different factors involved in explicit and implicit acquisition of a structure and also the nature of a structure and its difficulty and complexity. The findings of the study are discussed in detail and future venues for research are suggested.
Highlights
Since Truscott’s arguments against the effect of written corrective feedback (WCF) on improving second language (L2) writing (Truscott, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2010) and Ferris’s responses (Ferris, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2010, 2012, 2014), the effect of WCF on improving Second language (L2) learners’ writing has been studied extensively from different perspectives
Ellis (2002) in a review of the research investigating whether form-focused instruction (FFI) affects the acquisition of implicit knowledge, concludes that the findings only provide evidence that FFI contributes to implicit knowledge at above beginner proficiency levels and the issue of whether FFI works for the beginner learners is not answered yet
The result of pretest untimed and timed grammaticality judgment tests and metalinguistic knowledge test confirmed that the participants had no explicit and implicit knowledge of the target structure of this study, i.e., simple past tense
Summary
Since Truscott’s arguments against the effect of written corrective feedback (WCF) on improving second language (L2) writing (Truscott, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2010) and Ferris’s responses (Ferris, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2010, 2012, 2014), the effect of WCF on improving L2 learners’ writing has been studied extensively from different perspectives. There are some aspects of WCF which are under-researched or not researched as needed One of these issues is the potential role of WCF in acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge. Interface hypothesis, and WCF One of the key issues in second language acquisition (SLA) is the role of explicit and implicit knowledge in L2 learning. The main difference between explicit and implicit knowledge lies in the fact that whether learners are aware of what they know (Godfroid, Loewen, Jung, Park, Gass, & Ellis, 2015)
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