The Role of Oral Corrective Feedback Types in the Acquisition of the Grammatical Structures

Firoozeh Abedini,Mohammadtaghi Shahnazari

doi:10.5539/ijel.v6n3p127

Abstract

<p>This study investigated whether the effects of different types of corrective feedback (CF) (simple clarification request, enhanced prompt and elliptical elicitation) would differ on the acquisition of different types of grammatical structures. The target grammatical structures were verb endings (morphological morphemes) in three different English tenses including the simple present third person singular “-s”, the present continuous verb formation marker “-ing”, and the simple past verb ending” -ed”. These targets were chosen because they are rather problematic for EFL learners to acquire. For this purpose, 31 L1 Persian EFL learners at intermediate level were given an opportunity to carry out some tasks and were provided with different types of CF on their erroneous utterances. Data analysis on the output accuracy following feedback on the three grammatical targets showed that the proportion of errors corrected in response to CF in the form of enhanced prompt was more than the proportion of errors corrected in response to the other two types of CF. These results suggest that the more explicit the CF, the more effective it would be in correcting language learners’ erroneous utterances regardless of the type of given grammatical structure.</p>

Highlights

corrective feedback (CF) has been defined differentially by different scholars
This study investigated whether the effects of different types of corrective feedback (CF) would differ on the acquisition of different types of grammatical structures
These results suggest that a major amount of total CF was of elliptical elicitation, enhanced prompt was the most effective kind of CF in consolidation of the explicit knowledge of three target tenses

Summary

Introduction

Ellis (2006) has defined it as “responses to learner’s utterances containing an error”; Chaudron (1988) has taken it as a “complex phenomenon with several functions”. According to Leeman (2003), feedback acts as a mechanism by which language learners are provided with some evidence. This evidence can be either positive or negative. Positive evidence comprises information which illustrates that a phenomenon is possible in a given language and negative evidence, on the other hand, is information which illustrates what is not acceptable in the target language. Negative evidence might be of two kinds, direct or indirect. Direct negative evidence comes from the correction of the learner’s error by other language speakers; it can be called the corrective feedback, oral or written. Indirect negative evidence is seen when certain structures do not occur in a language

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion