Effects of Recasts and Metalinguistic Feedback on Developing

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of explicit and implicit oral corrective feedback during teacher-student interaction on English language learners' acquisition of biclausal request forms in the classroom instructional setting. Forty-one ELL students in three parallel intact classes were chosen to participate in the study. A two-way repeated measures Analysis of Variance was conducted to examine the effects of the treatment (two ways of corrective feedback, i.e., recasts and metalinguistic feedback) and time (pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest). The results demonstrated there were no significant differences between the two experimental groups and the control group. A closer examination of the effect size from the pretest to the immediate posttest revealed that the metalinguistic group yielded the largest effect size, followed by the recasts group. When the items containing only biclausal requests (high-level politeness requests) were examined separately, it was found that the metalinguistic group significantly outperformed the recasts group and the control group at the time of the immediate posttest. However, the improvement was not maintained in the delayed posttest.