The Effects Of Indirect CF And Metalinguistic Clues Feedback On Tag Question Acquisition

Much research has been carried out on the effectiveness of teachers’ feedback onlearners’ acquisition of English grammar. However, no conclusive answers are given. Onlyfew studies had paid attention to the efficiency of metalinguistic clues feedback. Tag questionhas not been touched in previous researches. However, tag question requires both linguisticknowledge and language processing. It is an ideal target structure for exploring the effects ofcorrective feedback.What is more, there are few studies carried out in the context of Englishpedagogy. With the purpose of obtaining more information of teacher feedback, the presentstudy is designed on the relevant ones to investigate the effects of metalinguistic cluesfeedback and indirect feedback on college students’ acquisition of English tag questions in thecontext of grammar pedagogy.The research aims to answer the two questions listed as follows:1) Which is more effective on the acquisition of English tag questions, metalinguisticclues feedback or indirect corrective feedback?2) Is there any relationship between learners’ proficiency level and the effects ofcorrective feedback?The experiment lasted about nine weeks. The experiment included a pre-test, threetreatments, a post-test, a delayed post-test and a questionnaire. The learners who participatedin the present study are60students from Hunan University of Chinese Medicine. They arefrom three intact classes, randomly assigned to metalinguistic clues feedback group, indirectfeedback group and control group.The SPSS16.0(statistical package for the social sciences, version16.0) is used toanalyze the data. The present study comes to the following conclusions:1) Both metalinguistic clues feedback group and indirect feedback group makestatistically significant improvement in their acquisition of English tag questions. Thefindings in the immediate post-test indicate that metalinguistic clues feedback group makesgreater improvement than the indirect feedback group in short term. But the results in thedelayed post-test reveal that, in the long run, indirect feedback group performs better than themetalinguistic clues feedback.2) If the participants’ language proficiency level is considered, there is no statisticallysignificant different between higher level students and lower level students in themetalinguistic clues feedback group and control group. But in the indirect feedback group,results show that there is a more positive effect for higher level students than lower levelstudents. All in all, there is a relationship between students’ language proficiency level and the effects of corrective feedback. The indirect feedback is more suitable for higher levelproficiency students. The lower level proficiency students should better take explicit feedback,such as metalinguistic clues feedback.This is one of the earliest studies in this field to specially address the effects of correctivefeedback in the context of grammar pedagogy and take language proficiency intoconsideration. In light of these findings, it is worthwhile to apply teacher feedback forstudents in grammar pedagogy; and it is also advisable that teachers vary their choices on thetypes of feedback according to students’ ability.