| Corrective feedback(CF)has become one of the foci of Second Language Acquisition(SLA)research.It is now widely recognized that either oral CF or written CF is beneficial to the acquisition of certain morphosyntactic forms.However,empirical studies have found that CF per se is not the only variable enhancing the effect of L2 learning,and some other variables are very likely to be involved(Ellis,2010;Bitchener & Ferris,2012).To examine the impact of relevant variables that may mitigate the efficacy of CF,a substantial number of studies have been conducted,demonstrating that different modes and types of CF may result in various degrees of noticeability of target features,thus possibly leading to differential learning effects.However,the extent to which the modes and types of CF can influence acquisition is still a controversial issue.Moreover,less attention has been paid to the effect of CF on syntactic features given their complexity and difficulty(Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman,1999;Shintai et al.,2014).To date though,few empirical studies have been conducted to explore the relative effects of CF on Chinese learners of English in their learning the main and subordinate clauses of past hypothetical conditional.Finally,given the paramount importance of individual differences,learners‘ L2 proficiency also needs to be taken into account to investigate how the effects of CF types on L2 learning interact with those of L2 proficiency.Based on the componential framework proposed by Ellis(2010),this study attempts to explore the effect of CF on L2 learning from multiple perspectives,including the effects of CF modes(oral vs.written),CF types(input-providing vs.output-prompting),and the interactive effects of learners‘ proficiency,grammatical features as well as noticing of CF and attitude to CF on Chinese EFL learners‘ acquisition of past hypothetical conditional.Accordingly,five research questions are addressed:1)What are the effects of oral and written CF on Chinese EFL learners‘ acquisition of past hypothetical conditional?2)To what extent does the effectiveness of CF vary with CF types?3)Do the effects of written CF incorporating writing practice on Chinese EFL learners‘ acquisition of past hypothetical conditional endure over time,especially in the subsequent pieces of writing?4)What are the effects of written CF on high-and low-proficiency Chinese EFL learners‘ acquisition of the main and subordinate clauses of past hypothetical conditional?5)To what extent do Chinese EFL learners‘ noticing of target forms and their attitude to teacher‘s CF moves affect their acquisition of past hypothetical conditional?To address these research questions,the present study adopted a pretest-posttest research design and conducted two experiments involving the use of reconstruction tasks.One hundred and eighty-two adult EFL learners at the tertiary level participated in Experiment 1,who were assigned to the six treatment conditions,namely,oral input-providing,oral output-prompting,oral control,written input-providing,written output-prompting,and written control.One hundred adult EFL learners participated in Experiment 2,who were assigned to one written direct CF group and one written indirect CF group.The collected data included oral transcripts and written texts,scores of grammar tests,writing tests,and grammatical judgment tests as well as the data from exit questionnaires.This study has obtained the following findings.First,the effect of CF is found to be related to CF modes and types.Specifically,based on the results of Experiment 1,the written input-providing CF was more effective than the oral input-providing CF,suggesting that CF mode has an impact on the effects of CF.The effectiveness of the written CF may be affected by its more explicit corrective force and less cognitive load than the oral CF.Besides,the output-prompting CF groups outperformed the input-providing CF groups in terms of the improvement of accuracy rates.Meanwhile,the former groups also achieved more significant gains than the latter groups in the posttests.This suggests that the output-prompting CF type be more conducive to promoting self-repair and deep processing than the input-providing CF type.The self-repair induces learners to reflect on their existing knowledge and help them acknowledge the suggested solution.In addition,the output-prompting CF type also engages learners in noticing the gap and fosters deep processing through the intensified frequency and rule explanation,thus reinforcing the knowledge in long-term memory.Second,it has been evidenced that CF can facilitate EFL learners‘ long-term grammatical improvement.Both the oral and written CF types(except the oral input-providing CF)significantly improved grammatical accuracy,suggesting that the explicit CF is helpful for interlanguage restructuring.Meanwhile,the results of writing tests showed that the written CF could help L2 learners better use the target features in the new pieces of writing than the control group,thus validating the potential for learners to internalize and consolidate their declarative knowledge gained through written CF together with the practice and repeated retrieval.Third,CF is proved to be beneficial to the acquisition of syntactic features but such effects may be mediated by the inherent nature of the syntactic features.Results of Experiment 2 showed that the mean scores of the subordinate clause of the past hypothetical conditional were significantly higher than those of the main clause.This validates the claim that the two syntactic structures are in fact different in the acquisition order(Chou,2000).It demonstrates that written CF can only be effective if it is directed at grammatical features that the learners are ready to acquire.Fourth,the effect of written CF is mediated by the learners‘ language proficiency.It was found that the high-proficiency learners benefitted from both CF types in the acquisition of main and subordinate clauses of past hypothetical conditional.Meanwhile,the low-proficiency learners benefitted from the indirect CF most in learning the target features.The possible explanation is that the indirect CF helps simplify the task,reduce the cognitive load and provides the learners with comprehensible input by pointing out the locus and nature of the error and providing rule explanations.In addition,it induces the repair or output which assists learners in noticing the target features and noticing the gap.Such a sequence of repairs can be helpful for the storage of the target features in long-term memory.However,the learners in the direct-low group may simply notice the error correction but do not understand the corrective intention.Fifth,there is a relationship between the effectiveness of CF and the degree of noticing.CF involved in the present study could direct the learners‘ attention to the target features,but the degree of noticing varied with the type of CF.Compared with the less explicit CF and the CF which offers no opportunities for repair,the more explicit CF and the CF which offers more opportunities for self-repair tend to be more powerful in directing learners‘ attention to the discrepancies between the erroneous form and the target form.However,the investigation into learners‘ attitude to CF failed to find significant between-group differences with respect to the relevant variables,revealing that learners in the EFL context generally hold positive attitude to teachers‘ correction.In all,the findings of the current study have proved that CF helps to develop the explicit knowledge of syntactic features.Meanwhile,the learning effect can be sustained and consolidated in the subsequent writing,thus providing evidence for the extension of the CF research scope and the effects of CF on long-term improvement.Besides,this study has found that the effectiveness of CF varies with other variables including CF mode,CF type,grammatical feature,L2 proficiency level and the noticeability of CF.The findings of the present study has important implications for EFL theory and practice in the Chinese context. |
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