The impact of corrective feedback on English articles

Abstract

AbstractStudies on focused written corrective feedback in L2 contexts report that such feedback is effective, even with learners’ use of English articles. They report that by narrowly targeting two single-rule-based functions—first-mention a/an and second-mention the—learners acquire greater mastery and control over these forms. The effects of such selective corrective feedback on learners’ understanding of the complex and opaque English article system has not yet been considered in this strand of research. This classroom-based study investigates the impact of such focused corrective feedback on learners’ remaining functional article uses. The results indicate that while the focused corrective feedback leads to increased accuracy in the simple rule-based functions of articles, the same feedback may negatively impact the remaining article functions, especially for the group that received the most explicit feedback in the form of metalinguistic explanation.