Effects Of Corrective Feedback On The Acquisition Of The Principle Of Subject-predicate Concord

Corrective feedback refers to the explicit or implicit response of the teacher to the gap between the target language and the interlanguage when the learner misuses the target language in order to provide input information for the learner to modify the error.Previous studies by many scholars have proved that corrective feedback can improve students' writing ability,especially the accuracy of language.In recent years,some researchers have begun to focus on the effect of corrective feedback on the acquisition of certain language characteristics and how factors such as feedback forms affect the effect of corrective feedback.The studies are mainly about the effectiveness of recast,metalinguistic feedback and other forms in the acquisition of grammatical structures such as articles,past tense of English verbs,gender in French and so on;while the researches into the principle of subject-predicate concord have been rarely and insufficiently conducted.In order to make up for the deficiency of the above researches,this study attempts to explore the influence of recast,explicit correction,metalinguistic feedback and other forms on the learning effect of the subject-predicate concord principle of Chinese college students.This paper uses the empirical research method to explore the effect of different corrective feedback forms on the acquisition of the principle of subject-predicate concord of college students and test the differences among recast,explicit correction and metalinguisitic feedback in the acquisition of subject-predicate concord principle.The study was conducted in a class of 63 non-English majors in a university in Hebei Province.There are 53 female students and 10 male students whose average age is 19 and average year of learning English is 10.6.The research employed a “pretest-experiment-post test-delayed post test” design and a quantitative analysis method.The subjects were divided into recast group,explicit correction group,metalinguistic feedback group and control group,and the acquisition of subject-predicate concord was measured through written tests.Each group was provided corresponding written corrective feedback and the control group did not be provided any feedback.The results show that any form of the correctivefeedback tested can promote the acquisition of the principle of subject-predicate concord with recast being the most effective form.The result indicates that recast can attract learners' attention to the target forms and remarkably improve learners' acquisition of the target language.The research result in the study can provide reference and inspiration for teacher feedback.