Comparing Explicit Exemplar‐Based and Rule‐Based Corrective Feedback: Introducing Analogy‐Based Corrective Feedback

Abstract

AbstractThis study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy‐based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must decode the analogy‐based feedback to understand the correction. A quasi‐experimental classroom‐based study was conducted with upper secondary Swedish EFL learners (N = 49) to investigate the effectiveness of corrective feedback varying in mode (inductive exemplar‐based or deductive rule‐based) on English subject–verb agreement. Explicit correction, metalinguistic, and analogy‐based corrective feedback, all explicitly providing evidence of error and including reformulation prompts, were assessed by timed and untimed grammaticality judgment and sentence completion tasks in a between‐groups pretest, posttest, delayed posttest design with a control group. Results indicate significant delayed gains for all feedback types on the untimed grammaticality judgment task for ungrammatical items. No clear advantage was seen for rule‐based or exemplar‐based CF. Descriptive statistics indicate different trends over successive testing times, where analogy‐based feedback often led to lowest performance on the immediate posttest but showed improvement on the delayed posttest, unlike the other two CF types.