Corrective Feedback During Communicate Tasks: Do Recasts, Clarification Requests and Explicit Correction Affect EFL Learners’ Second Language Acquisition Equally?

Abstract

The quasi-experimental was conducted to investigate the beneficial effects of three different types of corrective feedback (CF), namely recast, prompt (i.e., clarification request), and explicit correction with metalinguistic information, on Iranian EFL learners’ learning of definite and indefinite articles. For the purpose of the study, 75 male elementary EFL learners, aged 18 to 24, comprising 4 intact classes in a public language institute in Iran participated in the study. The four classes were randomly assigned into three treatment groups and one control group. During the intervention, each experimental group engaged in doing communicative tasks (i.e., narrative type) for 3 sessions and the learners in each group were provided with one specific type of CF in response to their errors, while the control group only engaged in communicative tasks. The participants’ knowledge of articles was measured in pre-tests one week prior to the outset of intervention and in post-tests which were administered two weeks after the last treatment using an untimed grammaticality judgement task and a timed written picture description task. Results of repeated-measured ANOVA with subsequent ANOVA and post-hoc test on the untimed grammaticality judgement task and ANCOVA on timed picture description task with post hoc comparisons indicated that the treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group. Additionally, explicit correction with metalinguistic information group outperformed the other treatment groups and the control group in both measures of the study. The researcher concludes that CF contributes to improvement in the knowledge of usage and the ability to use the language and explicit CF with metalinguistic information which results in deep level of understanding and entails longer time-outs from interaction works better than recasts and clarification requests for elementary learners in the EFL context of Iran.