Effect Of Written Corrective Feedback On Explicit And Implicit Knowledge Of English Relative Clause For High School Students

Relative clause is one of the most important and difficult points of high school English grammar.How to teach relative clause effectively has attracted attention of more and more researchers and instructors.In recent years,whether the corrective feedback provided by teachers is effective and what kind of feedback can promote the acquisition of target structure better have become research hotspots in the field of second language acquisition.There are almost no research studied the effects of corrective feedback on the acquisition of its explicit and implicit knowledge.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a more in-depth discussion on this topic in Chinese foreign language teaching environment,and strive to provide help to high school English teachers in the process of teaching relative clause.This study mainly examined the effects of corrective feedback in the forms of metalinguistic feedback and recast feedback on the acquisition of explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge of relative clause from three aspects:(1)The effects of metalinguistic feedback(MF)and recast feedback(RF)on high school students’ acquisition of explicit knowledge of English relative clause;(2)The effects of metalinguistic feedback(MF)and recast feedback(RF)on high school students’ acquisition of implicit knowledge of English relative clause;(3)The differences between the effects that MF and RF have on the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of English relative clause.Participants in this study were from two intact classes of Zhouqu High School in Lanzhou City,Gansu Province,with a total of 104 high school students.They were randomly divided into the metalinguistic feedback group and the recast feedback group.The metalinguistic feedback group(n=52)only accepted the feedback of providing the corresponding metalanguage explanation.The recast feedback group(n=52)accepted the feedback of providing correct form of answer.The whole experiment lasted for ten weeks,which adopted the experimental design in the form of pretest – relative clause teaching – practice – immediate posttest – delayed posttest.The explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge were measured by metalinguistic knowledge test and timed grammatical judgment task respectively.The data obtained by three testes were analyzed using SPSS 22.0.Through the analysis of data,the current study reached the following conclusions:(1)Both metalinguistic feedback and recast feedback had significant effect on the acquisition of explicit knowledge of relative clause;(2)For implicit knowledge of relative clause,metalinguistic feedback had certain positive effect,while recast feedback had no significant effect;(3)Metalinguistic feedback had better and more durable effect than recast feedback,thus,whether it is the acquisition of explicit knowledge or the acquisition of implicit knowledge,for high school students,metalinguistic feedback is the better choice.The study showed new evidence for the effectiveness of corrective feedback on teaching of relative clause.At the same time,it is recommended that teachers adopt appropriate and effective corrective feedback to enhance students’ mastery of relative clause.This thesis also pointed out the limitations of the current study and suggestions for the future studies.