| Among the perennial issues confronting instructed SLA researchers, as well as practitioners, is the role that corrective feedback plays in second language acquisition. This study compares two types of corrective feedback that have been examined in the past with conflicting results, prompts and recasts, and adds a third type of corrective feedback that has been called modified recasts.;A total of 250 participants, from ten intact classes, were divided into four different groups that received different feedback treatments during one hour of class. The treatment consisted of two communicative activities (a story reconstruction task and an information-gap activity) that lead participants to practice noun-adjective agreement and subject-verb agreement. While completing these activities, the four treatment groups received one of the following types of corrective feedback: (1) prompts, (2) recasts, (3) modified recasts, and (4) no feedback. The treatment classes were videotaped. All participants completed two tasks, directed by their actual instructor: a spontaneous oral production task and a grammaticality judgment task, during three testing sessions in a pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest design.;The results of the statistical analyses did not show any differences between groups in the oral production task, nor in the accuracy of the grammaticality judgment task. However, a second look at the in-class treatments revealed that the experimental groups received significantly different amounts of feedback. This study suggests that the question of how much feedback is given to learners is as important as the type of feedback that they receive. |
