A Study Of The Effects Of Recasts And Clarification Requests On Learners’ L2 Output:on Subject-Predicate Agreement Of The Third Person Singular Present Tense

It has been found that corrective feedback(CF) plays a vital role in learners’ second language development. Clarification request and recast, as the most frequently used corrective feedback strategies, have received great attention in the second language acquisition studies in recent years at home and abroad. It is a hot topic to research which type of feedback is more effective to reduce students’ mistakes and improve their English competence.Based on the analysis of the subject-predicate agreement of third person singular in present tense, which is a commonly grammatical error among junior middle school students in the context of Chinese EFL(English as a Foreign Language), the present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the two different corrective feedback strategies on junior middle school learners’ L2 oral output in the task-based interactive classrooms.Forty-two second-grade junior middle school students were selected as the participants, who were randomly divided into three groups, accepting test in different experimental conditions. The experiment lasted for five weeks. Before the experiment, all the subjects received a pretest. According to their pretest scores, the subjects were divided into three groups: the recast group, the clarification request group and the control group. The recast group took part in the oral output practice and the teacher gave them recasts as feedback. The clarification request group participated in the same oral output training and received clarification requests as feedback. In comparison, the control group took part in the same oral output practice without any forms of corrective feedback. After these three treatment sessions, all these three groups took the immediate posttest. One week after the immediate posttest, all the subjects accepted the delayed posttest.The findings of the present study show that the recast group performed better on the immediate test than the clarification requests group. The recast group made great improvement in learning the new grammar. However, the control group didn’t make any improvement. The results of the delayed posttest show that the English level of both the recast group and the clarification request group had declined. However, the clarification request group performed better on the delayed posttest than the recast group. As for the long-term learning effectiveness, the clarification requests group is superior to the recast group.The present study suggests that English teachers should give full consideration of learners’ existing knowledge level, reasonably use diverse corrective feedback strategies, guide the students to modify their oral errors independently in the output and provide more opportunities for learners to produce oral output.