The Effects Of Oral Corrective Feedback And Working Memory On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of The English Simple Past Tense

In many ways,oral corrective feedback(OCF)has been considered as an exemplary topic for second language acquisition(SLA)study and a hot issue concerning interaction in English as Foreign Language(EFL)classrooms.To date,a series of studies has been conducted on OCF,which aims to examine the effect of OCF on second language acquisition.These studies mainly adopted a cognitive approach,by employing information-processing theories such as Interaction Hypothesis and Noticing Hypothesis to elaborate the facilitative role of OCF in L2 development.And a few studies have also been made from the sociocultural perspective,attempting to investigate the effect of scaffolding through feedback in the process of interaction with teachers or peers on knowledge internalization.Among the studies on OCF,recast has attracted considerable attention due to its implicit feature and frequent utilization.In addition,in order to find out the differences between implicit feedback and explicit feedback in their efficacy,the effectiveness of metalinguistic feedback was usually compared with that of recast.However,no consensus has been reached so far on the effect of OCF on L2 development and the relative effectiveness of metalinguistic feedback and recast.The possible reason is that most of the studies adopted a research design with a single-factor causal chain,that is,they ignored the impact of individual differences and linguistic factors on the effect of OCF.In view of this,the present study,with oral picture description tasks and one-to-one feedback treatments between the researcher and the subjects as well as deep interviews,attempts to examine the effects of recasts and metalinguistic feedback and the interaction effect between working memory capacity(WMC)and OCF on Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of the English simple past tense by addressing the following specific questions:(1)Do recasts and metalinguistic feedback yield a positive effect on Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of the English simple past tense? If the answer is affirmative,is there any difference between the two feedback options in their efficacy?(2)Does working memory capacity moderate the effects of recasts and metalinguistic feedback on Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of the English simple past tense? If the answer is positive,how and to what extent is the efficacy of the two feedback options related to WMC?This study lasted twelve weeks with a “pretest-treatment-immediate posttest-delayed posttest” experimental design.In the first week,the WMC test and the pretest were administrated for choosing subjects and grouping.In the next three weeks,three feedback treatments were made separately,followed by the immediate posttest in the fifth week and the delayed posttest in the twelfth week.At the end of the whole experiment,two subjects in each group were selected to be interviewed according to their performance on the tests.The effectiveness of the feedback was measured by the change of the accuracy in the use of the English past tense through oral picture description tasks.At first,the WMC test picked out the High Working Memory(HWM)learners and the Low Working Memory(LWM)learners.Based on the results of the WMC test and the pretest,seventy-eight university freshmen were selected to be subjects,who were subsequently divided into three groups: 27 subjects in the recast group(HWM-14;LWM-13),26 subjects in the metalinguistic feedback group(HWM-14;LWM-12)and 25 subjects in the control group(HWM-13;LWM-12).The recast group was provided a reformulated sentence to the learner's non-target-like utterance and the metalinguistic group received a right sentence as well as linguistic information related to the target structure,while the control group finished the tasks and received no feedback.Results of the Independent Samples T Test,One-way ANOVA,Post hoc test and repeated measures ANOVA showed that:(1)Both the recast and the metalinguistic feedback exerted positive impact on Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of the English simple past tense,but no significant difference in their effectiveness was found between the two feedback options.(2)The overall performance of the learners with high working memory was better than that of the learners with low working memory and the former who received the meta-linguistic feedback obtained the best effect.(3)Although working memory could be a quite good predictor of the effects of the feedback,there was no significant interaction effect between the learners' working memory capacity and the two feedback options.The above findings may help to interpret learnersacquisition and the cognitive differences in their information processing and lend empirical support for the SLA theories which approve of the role of positive evidence and negative evidence in language development.Meanwhile,through the comparison between different types of feedback,the study will provide some guidelines for the use of different OCF options in the EFL classroom.In a word,this study has both theoretical and pedagogical implications.