| The role of corrective feedback in second language acquisition has received greatrecognition. In foreign language teaching, corrective feedback has great influence not only onlearners’ input of the target language but also on their output of target language. Thus, it stillattracts researchers’ attention. Researchers, like Ohta,2000; Braidi,2002; Panova&Lyster,2002:Loewen,2004; Lyster&Moris,2006; Ellis R and Sheen Y.2006,etc made great achievements inthis field. Most previous studies mainly targeted at high school students or collegestudents,and few studies have focused on primary students or children. Besides, scholarsfrom previous studies adopted the taxonomy of feedback in Lyster and Ranta(1997), and fewstudies have employed the classification of feedback in Ellis(2007). Though lots of differentlanguage forms have been studied, the English present progressive attracts little attention.Considering its wide use in primary English classroom and the difficulty students still have inacquiring it, the present study aims to explore the effects of input providing and outputprompting feedback on children’ s acquisition of this structure.The study was conducted in a training school of XiangTan, Hunan province. Studentsfrom Grade5are chosen as participants. Combining experiment and interview, the studymainly explored the following questions:1. Does corrective feedback play a role instrengthening the acquisition of present progressive that children have partially mastered?2.Ifit works, do children improve more from input providing feedback or output promptingfeedback?3. Which feedback type is more preferable among children?Twenty-one students at the age of10to12were randomly assigned into3groups.Each group included7students and all participants took part in a pre-test, an immediatepost-test and a delayed post-test separately. In the treatment sessions, teachers provideddifferent types of feedback based on groups, namely, input providing feedback and outputprompting feedback. As for the control group, no feedback was provided and they only tookpart in the treatment sessions. The whole experiment was carried out in a dyadic interactionbetween two teachers and participants. Before the experiment, teachers arranged awarming-up to ensure that participants had clearly understood the procedures andrequirements of the experiment. After the experiment, the researcher herself arranged an interview with the participants to find out which feedback type was more preferable amongchildren. In order to make sure that all children were familiar with the technical terms offeedback, the researcher gave detailed explanation to them. The whole experiment andinterview were recorded with a voice recorder(SUMSUNG, YP-U3). Two weeks later, postdelayed-test was administered to measure the long effect of feedback.At last, data collected from the experiment were analyzed by SPSS(16.0). And data fromthe interview was first transcribed and then presented into a chart. Descriptive statistics andstandard means of the three tests were provided. One-way A NOVA analysis and post-hocTuket tests,etc. were also provided in the following.The experiment revealed conclusions that both input providing feedback and outputprompting feedback exerted significant effects on children’ s acquisition of target structure.For the control group with no feedback, there was no progress made in the tests. Comparingthe effects of the two feedback types, the researcher found that output prompting feedbackoutperformed input providing feedback. However, results of the delayed post-test indicatedthat both of the two experimental groups showed a tendency of back step, and that thedifference between them did exist but with no obvious gap. The Sig. Between the twoexperiments groups was quite closer. After the interview, the researcher found that outputprompting feedback was more preferable among children for it left deep impressions on themand helped them keep a clear memory. However, other children claimed that the twofeedback types were both OK. |
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