The Effects Of The Types And The Timing Of Feedback On The Acquisition Of A New Grammatical Structure

In recent twenty years,the corrective feedback in classroom that teachers perform have attracted more and more researchers' attention,especially in recent years,empirical studies are dominant in feedback research,its purpose is to investigate the effect of one or several kinds of feedback types or different feedback timing(immediate and delayed)on SLA,but there is very few studies concerning the combination of feedback types and feedback timing.This study aimed at investigating: 1)Under immediate and delayed corrective feedback conditions,the effect of metalinguistic feedback on the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of the English past passive structure;2)Under immediate and delayed corrective feedback conditions,the effect of recasts on the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of the English past passive structure;3)Under immediate and delayed corrective feedback conditions,the differences between metalinguistic feedback and recasts on the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of the English past passive structure.This study includes three theories: the noticing hypothesis,the interaction hypothesis,comprehensible output hypothesis.Using three testing stages: pretests,immediate posttests,and delayed posttests.The number of learners of English as a foreign language(EFL)was 75,they are Junior high school second-year students who are from Mingde middles school of Lintao.This study had four experimental groups and one control group.Four experimental groups are: immediate-metalinguistic feedback group,delayed-metalinguistic feedback group,immediate-recast group and delayed-recast group.The control group is no feedback group.Each group includes fifteen students.The corrective feedback is finished by two narrative tasks.Before one week of two tasks providing pretests,after attending two tasks,immediate posttests would be given at once.Then after one week,delayed posttests was provided.For the first and the second research questions,The effect of explicit and implicit knowledge was tested by untimed grammaticality Judgment tests and Elicited Oral imitation tests.Then for the third research question,according to the data of the first and the second research question,the effects of metalinguistic feedback and recast are compared on the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge.Finally,SPSS 13 was used to analyse the data,which mainly included descriptive statistics and one-way ANOVA.The findings of these research questions in the present study are as follows: 1)under immediate and delayed feedback condition,the result of the learners' explicit knowledge acquisition reveled that metalinguistic feedback had obvious effect on the acquisition on posttest 1 and posttest 2,but metalinguistic feedback have no significant effect on the acquisition of learners' implicit knowledge;2)under immediate and delayed feedback condition,the result of the learners' explicit knowledge acquisition reveled that recasts had obvious effect on the acquisition of posttest 1 and posttest 2,but recasts did not have significant effect on the acquisition of learners' implicit knowledge;3)under immediate and delayed feedback condition,metalinguistic feedback was superior to recasts,and immediate feedback performed better than delayed feedback,but there was no significant differences between immediate feedback and delayed feedback.The results can be interpreted as follows: corrective feedback only was beneficial to explicit knowledge,metalinguistic feedback was better than recasts could be explained as follows: the possible reason was that in the process of producing new passive sentences,teachers used metalinguistic feedback always correct learners' language structure and form,recasts just learners correct language form without mentioning language grammar,and immediate feedback was superior to delayed feedback,the possible reason was in the process of immediate feedback learners used the feedback consistently,But delayed feedback just happened after all wrong grammars being putting together.So teachers should use more explicit feedback on learners' explicit knowledge.