Effects Of Implicit And Explicit Corrective Feedback On Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition Of Dative Alternation

Corrective feedback (CF) has been a heated topic in the past decades. Its positiverole in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has been confirmed both theoretically andempirically in some researches. However, as to the relative effectiveness of differenttypes of CF, there is still much to be contended considering the fact that previousresearches at home and abroad lack consistency in their purposes and designs.This study, getting inspiration and drawing lessons from Carroll and Swain (1993)and its replication study made by Kim and Mathes (2001), is mainly aimed toinvestigate the relative effectiveness of implicit CF (in the form of recast) and explicitCF (in the form of metalinguistic explanation) on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition ofEnglish dative alternation.The subjects of the present study are28English-major freshmen of HuaiyinTeachers College. Besides the experimental sessions, students have also participatedin a grammaticality judgment test (in the form of the listening test), a dative alternationjudgment test (with both English and its corresponding Chinese sentences) and aquestionnaire survey. The major findings are briefed as follows:First, explicit CF in the form of metalinguistic feedback generates a significanteffect on learners’ acquisition of English dative alternation while recast makes nosignificant difference.Second, generally speaking, metalinguistic feedback is more effective than recastin promoting EFL learners’ acquisition of dative alternation and the longer the term is,the more obvious its advantage is.Third, metalinguistic feedback promotes both item learning and system learningsince there is a significant gain shown in the production sessions of metalinguisticgroup.Fourth, Group A’s growth in production sessions is much greater than Group B’s.Fifth, students’ knowledge of Chinese dative alternation has almost no impact ontheir learning of English dative alternation. Sixth, in the second dative alternation judgment test, both groups show slight butnot statistically significant improvements.Besides, students prefer explicit feedback in the form of metalinguistic feedback toimplicit feedback in the form of recast and they consider the former is generally moreeffective than the latter.Last, based on these findings, suggestions for future language teaching are alsopresented.