A Study On The Effects Of Cognitive Style And Corrective Feedback In College Students' Second Language Acquisition

Corrective feedback is widely employed in classroom teaching.Substantial observational or experimental studies have been conducted to examine the effectiveness of corrective feedback in second language acquisition.A plethora of studies were conducted to investigate the effects of different corrective feedback types,yet there was no consensus on the effectiveness of prompts and recasts.Recently researchers began to probe into the mediating variables such as individual difference and context on second language acquisition.Less research has been conducted on the effects of cognitive styles on corrective feedback and second language acquisition.The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of corrective feedback combined with form-focused instruction on Chinese EFL students' acquisition of English third-person singular form and to examine whether cognitive style can predict the effect of recasts or prompts.Specifically,the study employed a quasi-experiment to compare the effectiveness of recasts and prompts on the acquisition of English third person singular form.The experiment lasted 8 weeks.Three teachers and 175 college students participated in the experiment.Altogether 175 participants from four intact classes assigned in four groups(three treatment groups and one control group)participated in a pretest and two posttests.Participants in treatment groups participated in the form-focused instructionactivities of the target structure for three weeks.Each group was then sub-grouped into field-independence and field-dependence.The data of the experiment,the questionnaire and the interview were collected for analysis.The results show that:First,form-focused instruction activities with corrective feedback facilitate learners' acquisition of third person singular form in oral imitation test and the written test.FFI together with prompts is significantly more effective than FFI only in facilitating students' learning of the target structure.Second,prompts significantly outperformed recasts in promoting the learners' acquisition of third person singular form in the above two tests.Third,field dependence and field independence scores can be predictive to the effect of recasts in the text-completion test,whereas,field independence can also be a predictor of the effectiveness of prompts in the written test.The research findings may have implications for Chinese EFL classroom teaching.It is more effective for teachers to implement corrective feedback in classroom teaching taking the learners' cognitive style into account.