The Effect Of Corrective Feedback On College Non-English Majors' Acquisition Of Past Tense

This empirical study was designed to investigate the effects of corrective feedback on Chinese low-intermediate college non-English majors'acquisition of past tense. Under the guidance of Focus on Form which emphasizes the balance of fluency and accuracy in language teaching, the effects of recast representing implicit feedback and the effect of metalinguistic clues representing explicit feedback were compared and learners'noticing of the two types of corrective feedback was studied. Recast provides learners with input while metalinguistic clues promote learners'output.This study lasted nine weeks and included a pretest, four treatment sessions, a immediate posttest, a noticing interview and a delayed posttest. 30 sophomores participated in this study, including 9 females and 21 males. The subjects were divided into two treatment groups and a control group. They finished the task of describing photos and pictures. Students in the recast group received recast when making errors of past tense;students in the metalinguistic clues group received metalinguistic clues when making errors of past tense and the control group didn't receive any corrective feedback from the teacher when making errors. After the immediate delayed posttest, the subjects had a noticing interview to collect the information of which corrective feedback was more likely to be noticed.The SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version 13.0) was used to analyze the data. The statistical techniques adopted for analysis were Descriptive Statistics, Paired-Samples T Test and One-Way ANOVA Analysis. Through analyzing the data and the interview record, two conclusions are generated:1)There is no significant difference of the effect of recast and metalinguistic clues for the low-intermediate non-English majors in terms of learning past tense.2)Compared with recast, metalinguistic clues are more likely to be noticed by the low-intermediate non-English majors.Based on the above findings, some constructive suggestions were put forward forcollege English learning and teaching. Finally, the paper presented some possible aspects for future study.