Negative Feedback In Task-based Interactions And Children's Acquisition Of English Noun Plural Markings

Feedback is very important for learners to learn L2, so it attracts a lot of attention in the field of L2 acquisition. Recently, researchers do not reach an agreement in some aspects of feedback. In addition, many researches concerning feedback in adult L2, the studies of interactional feedback in child L2 are few. Accordingly, I have done an empirical research in investigating feedback and child EFL learners'English plural marking acquisition, the research examines the impacts of negative feedback on child EFL learners'plural marking acquisition during task-based interaction.The research questions of this study are:(1) How will child EFL learners react to recasts, clarification requests, or these two in combination in task-based interaction?(2) Will interactional negative feedback, including recasts, clarification requests, and these two in combination in task-based interactions be effective in promoting child EFL learners'acquisition of English noun plural markings?(3) Will child EFL learners'repairs in response to the interviewer's feedback be significant predictors of their language development?This study employs a pre-test, 3 treatment phases, an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test. In test and treatment sessions, the child EFL learners in this study and the interviewer took part in task-based interaction. There are two variables manipulated in the treatment conditions: recasts and clarification requests, then four treatment conditions representing different combinations of these two variables: group1: feedback with positive evidence; group 2: feedback with opportunity to modify; group 3: enhanced opportunity to modify; group 4: interaction control.The SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version 13.0) is used as a statistical analytical instrument. The following 3 operating methods have been used: Descriptive Statistics, One-Way ANOVA procedures and Bivariate Correlate analysis.Through the analysis and discussion, this study obtains the following three findings:(1) Negative feedback could bring about L2 learners' awareness of their un- target-like output and their correction of it. Among the different kinds of negative feedback, the most effective is the combination of recasts and clarification requests, which could elicit the highest percentage of uptake and repair from the learners. The second most effective is clarification requests, followed by recasts.(2) Negative feedback during task-based interaction could promote learners'L2 acquisition. Specifically, the co-occurrence of recasts and clarification requests is the most effective feedback type for helping learners developing their L2, the second effective feedback type is recasts, and the third is clarification requests.(3) In most occasions, learners'repairs are not closely related to their language development.Limitation of the current study and implications of the findings for second language teaching are also discussed.