The Effects Of Oral Feedback Types On Learners’ Acquisition Of Past Tense Forms In Junior High School

For the past decades,the role of corrective feedback(CF)has drew more and more attention and it has become a center of research in the field of Second Language Acquisition(SLA).Most researchers pay attention to the influence and incidence of the CF.But researches of effects of oral feedback types on different target structures are rare.The present study aims at investigating the effects of feedback types on Chinese learners’ acquisition implicit and explicit knowledge of regular and irregular English past tense forms.This study depends on the output hypothesis,noticing hypothesis,interaction hypothesis and skill learning theory.Thirty EFL learners in 3 intact classes at the Miaoqu middle school in Zhenyuan County,Gansu Province participated in the study.The 3 classes were randomly assigned to one recast + clarification request group(n=10),one metalinguistic feedback group(n=10),and one recast group(n=10).In pretest,the implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge of regular and irregular past tense was tested by oral imitation and grammatical judgement tests.The instructional treatment included two tasks which highlighted the target forms and elicited oral production of the target forms from the students.In the three feedback groups,teachers consistently provided one type of feedback(i.e: recast +clarification request or recast or metalinguistic feedback)in response to learners’ errors during the communicative activities.In immediate posttest and delayed posttest,the implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge was also tested by oral imitation and grammatical judgement tests.SPSS 21 was used to analysis the data,which mainly included descriptive statistics and mixed-method ANOVAs.The finding of three research questions in the present study are as follows:(1)The recast+clarification request,metalinguistic feedback group had significant gains inaccuracy of explicit knowledge of regular past tense and irregular past tense.The recast group showed significant gains in the explicit knowledge for irregular past tense,but only achieved significant short-term gains for regular past tense in explicit knowledge.(2)The recast +clarification request,metalinguistic feedback group had significant gains inaccuracy of implicit knowledge of regular past tense and irregular past tense.The recast group achieved significant short-term gains in the implicit knowledge for irregular past tense.And the recast+ clarification request had also outperformed the recast group in acquisition of implicit knowledge of regular past tense tests.(3)The effects of recast+ clarification request and metalinguistic feedback were larger than those of recasts for increasing accuracy in the use of regular past tense forms,whereas recast+clarification request,metalinguistic feedback and recasts had similar effects on improving accuracy in the use of irregular past tense forms.The study tried to use modified output,CF saliency,target structure saliency and skill learning theory etc.to explain the effects of feedback types on Chinese learners’ acquisition implicit and explicit knowledge of regular and irregular English past tense forms.