| Corrective feedback(CF) has long been a hot topic in the field of SLA. A great many researches at home and abroad have been done to study the effectiveness of CF, to compare the relative effectiveness of different types of CF, as well as to figure out the factors that influence the effectiveness of CF. But for many reasons the results have been mixed. And so further study is needed to be carried out to gain a more holistic and comprehensive understanding of the research area of CF.Based on Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis, Long’s Interaction Hypothesis and Daneman and Carpenter’s Resource Sharing Theory, the present study was aimed to explore the relative effectiveness of implicit and explicit feedback on Chinese EFL learners’ use of subjunctive mood. Besides, this study investigated the interaction between working memory(WM) and the effectiveness of CF. Two research questions addressed in this study are as follows: 1. Is there any difference between the effectiveness of implicit and explicit feedback on Chinese EFL learners’ use of subjunctive mood? If yes, what is it? 2. Does Chinese EFL learners’ working memory capacity interact with the effectiveness of implicit and explicit feedback as regards the use of subjunctive mood? If yes, what is it?The participants in this study were 64 second-year non-English majors from Wenzheng College, Soochow University. The present study employed a listening span test to measure the participants’ working memory capacity(WMC), as well as a subjunctive mood test consisting of an oral translation test, a timed grammatical judgment test(GJT) and a blank-filling test to measure their performances on subjunctive mood in pretest, immediate and delayed posttests. These participants were first divided into Group WMC High and Low according to their score in the listening span test, with each group including 32 students. And then the two groups were further divided into four subgroups: high-implicit, high-explicit, low-implicit and low-explicit. The experiment lasted 8 weeks. In the first week, a listening span test was carried out to test the participants’ WMC. In Week 2, a pretest was conducted to test their prior mastery of the target structure. In Week 3, a treatment of CF was held. During the treatment, the participants were asked to do oral practice. Group Implicit received implicit feedback provided by the researcher in the form of recasts and Group Explicit received explicit feedback in the form of corrections. The treatment was followed by an immediate posttest in the same week. In Week 8, a delayed posttest was conducted to observe the long-term effectiveness of CF. The quantitative data were processed by the software of SPSS 16.0. The results of Group Implicit and Group Explicit were compared to find answers to the first research question. Then analysis of the interaction between WM and the effectiveness of CF was made to answer the second research question.The major findings of this study are summarized as follows: 1. Explicit feedback is more effective than implicit feedback in promoting Chinese EFL learners’ use of subjunctive mood. But the effectiveness of implicit feedback maintains better. 2. There exists significant interaction between WM and the effectiveness of different types of CF, but WM only moderates the effectiveness of explicit feedback.The results of this study provide positive implications for EFL teaching, suggesting that explicit feedback is recommended when target structure is relatively complex and teacher feedback is long. Besides, it suggests that teachers should take EFL learners’ cognitive abilities, such as WM, into consideration because the extent to which learners could benefit from CF varies from learners with different levels of cognitive abilities. |
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