Effects Of Prompts And Recasts On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of English Verb Past Tense Forms

Corrective feedback (CF), as an important sub-type of classroom feedback, has been widely studied by a growing number of researches in the past two decades or so. The study of CF generally falls into two categories:the descriptive research and the empirical studies. The descriptive research focuses mainly on different classifications of CF. the implicitness versus the explicitness of CF. learners'cognitive processing involved by a corresponding sub-type of feedback, the positiveness versus negativeness of different CF as well as their effects on language acquisition with learners' affect functioning as the filter. While the empirical studies mainly compare the effects of the same type of corrective feedback (mostly recasts) on the acquisition of different language structures or make a comparative study of the effects of different kinds of feedback on the acquisition of the same target structure.The present study investigates the effects of the two most frequently studied categories of corrective feedback:prompts and recasts. on the learning of irregular past tense forms (exemplar-based system) and regular past tense forms (rule-based system) that are elicited in the four activities during the treatment session and then examined in the oral and written tests. It is to a large extent a replication research of Yingli Yang and Roy Lyster's research (2010) on the effects of form-focused practice and feedback on Chinese EFL learners'use of irregular and regular past forms. The reason that the present study is only partially a replication study lies in the different language proficiency levels of subjects in the two studies. Yang and Lyster choose second-year English majors as their subjects while this study sets its background in three English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms in a university of Western China where the learners are first-year non-English majors. The choosing of different subjects is inspired by Ammar and Spada's (2006) empirical research result which shows the effect of learners' language proficiency on the effectiveness of feedback. However, there are few studies, if any, that focus specifically on the role of language proficiency on the effects of feedback. Thus, with other variables similar, if the results turn out to be much different from Yang and Lyster's, then conclusion can be drawn that learners' language proficiency does influence the effects of feedback.This quasi-experimental study compares the effects of three different feedback treatments on 113 Chinese learners of English (in their first grade) in X University in Chongqing. The data comes from three classes of similar backgrounds (age range, teacher, English proficiency, learning style, first language, gender ratio, classroom atmosphere. learners' length of English learning) which are randomly assigned to the three groups:one for control, one for recasts and one for prompts. During the treatments, the students are required to participate in four kinds of form-focused activities which elicit the target language forms. In the two feedback groups, the teacher consistently provides one corresponding type of feedback in reaction to leareners' errors during the activities, whereas in the control group, the instructor only provide feedback on content instead of language forms. Two sets of tests (both oral and written) are conducted before, immediate after and two weeks after the experiment to evaluate learners'progress on the accurate use of irregular and regular past tense. A repeated-measures ANOVA is adopted to compare the group means of accuracy scores among the three groups across the three tests and it consistently indicates the significant time effect. In addition, post hoc within-group analyses with effect size (d) as their index are used on the eight measures of the immediate tests and delayed tests.The results are generally consistent with those in Yang and Lyster's study which shows significant gains of the prompt class on all eight measures while only four for the recast class and three for the control group. For the accuracy improvement in the use of irregular past tense forms, prompts and recasts have similar effects, whereas for the improvement of using regular past tense, prompts shows larger effects than recasts do, which suggests that prompts benefit both the acquisition of rule-based and also item-based language systems, while the effects of recasts are more obvious on learning item-based system. These findings conform to those of Yang and Lyster's research, which suggests that learners' language proficiency does not affect the effects of feedback types. The result is in confrontation with Ammar and Spada's (2006) and it may be explained in that though the subjects' general language proficiency in the present study is lower than that in Yang and Lyster's study, when it comes to the specific mastery of past tense forms, it may not be the case. As in China, learners start the learning of past tense forms from junior middle schools, it is likely that learners have already acquired most of the target structures involved in the written and oral tests.The above findings have implications for further research in this field, particularly research on learners' language proficiency in relation to the effects of feedback. More attention should be paid to the measuring of learners'language proficiency:whether it should be classified according to learners'overall performance in a comprehensive test or just based on learners' performance on the specific structures targeted in the study. As to the pedagogical significance, the overall significant gains of prompts both on regular past tense (rule-based system) and irregular past tense (exemplar-based system) in comparison to the limited effects of recasts on the acquisition of irregular past tense (exemplar-based system) suggests to teachers that more prompts be used in response to learners' errors, especially those errors on rule-based system.This is one of the earliest studies in this field to specially address the role of language proficiency on the effects of corrective feedback and future related studies need to further explore this issue. To avoid the limitations of the present study, future research can employ more subtypes of recasts, choose subjects with different proficiency levels on the particular target structure, employ other kinds of treatment materials. vary the data collection methods. prolong the treatment session and so on.