A Study Of The Effect Of Recast And Prompt Feedback On Junior High School Students’ Learning Of English Simple Past Tense

A large number of researches have been made for the effect of feedback in laboratory settings and in immersion classrooms. These previous studies have proved that the corrective feedback is effective for SLA, but a consensus has not been reached on which kind of corrective feedback is more effective. So this study is conducted to find out the effects of two most frequently used corrective methods – recast and prompt on junior high school students’ acquisition of English simple past.This research involves 120 subjects of second grade students in a junior high school in Xing Cheng. The study lasts for 5weeks. It collects feedbacks in class, and uses pre-test, teacher intervention, post-test and delayed post-test to analyze the effects of the two feedbacks. The subjects are divided into recast group, prompt group and control group separately.This study will use teacher’s intervention to interference the experimental process, and oral and written tests to test the subjects’ simple past acquisition. In the experiment, the recast and prompt group will go on the targeted feedback and correction according to the subjects’ mistakes about English simple past, while the teacher in the control group will only feedback to the contents of students’ answers, not their grammar mistakes, which will be concluded after the research.As to the data results, three groups’ post-tests are all better than their pre-tests in the oral tests of simple past. In the written tests, the accuracy of prompt group in the post-test is much higher than that in the pre-test and recast group, which reflects the prompt feedback is more effective than recast feedback in correcting students’ grammar mistakes, and it can make learners focus on the targeted grammar forms and go on self-correction, then they are able to acquire their targeted grammar.