The Effects Of Feedback Timing On Junior Two Learners' English Grammar Acquisition

For the past decades,the role of corrective feedback(CF)has attracted more and more attention and it has become a focus of research in the field of Second Language Acquisition(SLA).Most researchers pay attention to the effectiveness and incidence of the CF.However,research of feedback timing,especially research on the comparative effect between immediate feedback and delayed feedback is rare.Based on the Noticing Hypothesis,Interaction Hypothesis and Skill Acquisition Theory,the current study extends research on oral CF by investigating how timing of CF affects high-achieving and low-achieving learners' English past tense structure acquisition.The present study attempts to answer two research questions:(1)To what extent does the feedback timing affect high-achieving and low-achieving learners'grammar acquisition?(2)What are the differences between high-achieving and low-achieving learners' attitudes toward corrective feedback?One hundred and forty-four students from grade eight who learned English as a Foreign Language(EFL)in a junior middle school in China participated in the experiment.All the learners were from three natural classes.Learners inside each class were divided into high-achieving and low-achieving learners according to their mid-term exam scores.Two of the natural classes were chosen as the immediate and delayed feedback group respectively,the rest class was seen as the control group.All of the learners attended a ninety-minute treatment session in which they performed two dictogloss tasks,and the target structure was the past tense of English.The two experimental groups received different types of feedback timing according to their group assignment.The learners in the immediate feedback group received oral feedback from teacher immediately after they produced the wrong utterances about the target structure,while the delayed feedback group received oral feedback after their whole performance.The two experimental groups received either immediate or delayed feedback in the forms of prompts followed by recasts.The control group completed the treatment tasks with no feedback.Accurate use of the target feature was measured by the pretest and posttest.Besides pretest and posttest,all the participants finished questionnaires.The results showed that(1)overall,the immediate feedback was effective than the delayed feedback and no feedback.Immediate feedback was effective for low-achieving learners while delayed feedback was not;high-achieving learners benefited equally from immediate and delayed feedback;(2)both the high-achieving and low-achieving learners hold positive attitudes toward the role of CF in improving their language proficiency and grammar acquisition.This study provides practical guidance for the use of feedback timing,which is intened to help both teachers and learners in their future study.