Effects Of The Immediate And The Delayed Oral Corrective Feedback On Junior High School Students’ Acquisition Of The Present Perfect Tense

In the past few decades,more and more researchers paid attention to teachers’corrective feedback,because teachers’ corrective feedback is an effective way to help students recognize errors and improve their English level.However,researchers at home and abroad have done more research on written corrective feedback.There is relatively little research on oral corrective feedback,among which the timing of oral corrective feedback is an important research direction.Therefore,this study aimed to explore the impact of the immediate and the delayed oral corrective feedback on junior high school students’ acquisition of the present perfect tense,and tried to address the following research questions:1.What are the effects of the immediate and the delayed oral corrective feedback on junior high school students’ acquisition of the present perfect tense?2.What are the effects of the immediate and the delayed oral corrective feedback on junior high school students’ acquisition of the present perfect tense of regular and irregular verbs?The participants of this study were 90 students in 8th grade from a junior high school.They were divided into three groups with 30 students in each group,namely:the immediate feedback group,the delayed feedback group and the control group.Immediate feedback meant that if students committed errors in the process of retelling,their teacher would interrupt immediately and corrected them.Delayed feedback meant that teachers corrected students’ mistakes after students completed the retelling task.Students in the control group only retold articles without receiving any feedback from their teacher.Before the experiment,all the participants took a pretest to check whether there was significant difference in students’ proficiency of the present perfect tense.During the treatment,teacher’s feedback was provided through two retelling tasks.There were totally 30 target structure sentences in these two articles,including 18 regular verbs and 12 irregular verbs.After the experiment,all the students took the immediate posttest.One week later,the students took the delayed posttest.The major findings were summarized as follows.First of all,both the immediate and the delayed oral corrective feedback had obvious effects on students’ acquisition of the present perfect tense.However,the immediate feedback outperformed the delayed feedback in both the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest.What’s more,the effects of feedback in the immediate posttest were superior to the delayed posttest.Secondly,both the immediate and the delayed feedback facilitated students’acquisition of the present perfect tense of regular and irregular verbs.However,no significant differences were found between the immediate and the delayed oral corrective feedback.Some pedagogical implications were pointed out the timing of oral corrective feedback.First,the teachers should be aware of the effects of the oral corrective feedback on students’acquisition of the English grammatical structure,and adopt the appropriate type of oral feedback in the classroom.Second,the teachers should conduct the immediate oral corrective feedback,guide students to correct their mistakes and help them acquire the target structure when students commit errors in oral tasks.