The Effects Of Corrective Feedback On The Acquisition Of Learners'Explicit And Implicit Knowledge Of The English Articles

Many previous studies have been carried out to explore an effective way to teach articles.Whether corrective feedback is effective and which type of feedback provided by English instructors is more effective in promoting the acquisition of English articles has attracted more and more researchers' interests.In China,studies concerning the relationship between English articles and corrective feedback are few.Furthermore,research on the effect of corrective feedback on the development of implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles is even scarce.As a result,it is crucial to conduct more research on these topics in our Chinese context,so that researchers and English instructors can understand better and more clearly of corrective feedback and English articles.The study extends the current work on two kinds of corrective feedback in three main ways.First,it examines whether direct corrective feedback(DCF)has any effect on ESL learners' implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles.Second,it explores whether metalinguistic feedback(MF)can play a positive role in ESL learners' implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles.Last,it compares the effect of the two kinds of feedback on English articles.The participants of the current study were 113 sophomores of English major from Jiangxi Normal University,randomly assigned to three groups,namely,DCF group,MF group and control group.As the name implied,the three groups received different kinds of feedback.DCF group(N=36)received direct correction only on their article errors,namely,the locations of any article error and the correct forms above or near the wrong forms.Participants in MF group(N=40)received a handout of metalinguistic explanation on English articles,and should recognize and correct their article errors themselves after comprehending the usages of articles.The control group(N=37)didn't get any feedback on their writings during the experiment time,but after the research,they were offered written direct corrective feedback on their writings.The whole research lasted 4 weeks,employing a pattern of pretest---treatment---immediate posttest---delayed posttest.The effects of these two kinds of corrective feedback on explicit and implicit article knowledge were measured by an error correction test and three writing tasks.The data were analyzed by the SPSS Version20.0.Descriptive statistical analysis,one-way ANOVA and paired samples T-test were the main statistical approaches.The major findings in the current study can besummarized as follows:1)The second-year English majors got low scores in the error correction pre-test and the first writing task.This implied that they did not acquire the full usage of the English articles even though they have been learning English for such a long time.2)Written DCF had significant and sustained effects on English majors' implicit knowledge of articles.The DCF group outperformed the control group,which indicated that written DCF was better than no feedback in developing learners' implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles.MF can promote English majors' development of both implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles significantly,and the effects were durable.By comparison,it can be found that MF was more successful in facilitating English majors' implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles.If the purpose is to develop learners' explicit knowledge of articles,then MF will be the choice.If the purpose is to foster learners' implicit knowledge of articles,then both MF and DCF can be chosen,but the effect of MF is better.This study put forward a novel proof for the discrepancy over the efficacy of corrective feedback.Some pieces of advice on adopting appropriate and effective corrective feedback for English teachers were given in order to improve learners' accuracy of English articles.The limitations and some suggestions for further research are also pointed out.