The Effectiveness of Different Corrective Feedback on College English Learners’ Acquisition of Subjunctive Mood

Abstract

The study mainly investigates the effectiveness of explicit feedback and implicit feedback on college English learners' acquisition of subjunctive mood. In an experimental design (two treatment groups and one control group), 120 non-English major students completed four communicative activities during which they received either metalinguistic feedback (explicit feedback) or recasts (implicit feedback) or no feedback from the teacher in case of any erroneous utterance in the target grammar structure. Three paper tests (a pre-test, an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest) were employed to measure students' knowledge of subjunctive mood, which essentially reflected their acquisition. Results show that both explicit feedback and implicit feedback are effective in learners' acquisition of subjunctive mood and their effects can be retained for a relatively long time. Explicit feedback is proved to be even more beneficial than implicit feedback, as it can trigger more learners' noticing of the target linguistic features.

A Review on Corrective Feedback Research of the Recent 20 Years

“…Zhang (2020) found that learners' native language background, personality, language level and other factors would affect their understanding and response to Corrective Feedback and their choice of Corrective Feedback mode. Zhang (2016) found that high-level learners can benefit from two different forms of feedback, while indirect feedback has a more obvious effect on low-level learners, which may be because indirect feedback reduces the difficulty of tasks by delineating error areas, indicating error categories and providing feedback functions such as rule interpretation.…”

“…After comparing the effect of explicit recasting and implicit recasting on middle school students' grammar, Guo (2013) concluded that explicit recasting is the best choice for teachers compared with implicit recasting. Zhang (2016) found that compared with implicit feedback and input feedback, explicit feedback and output feedback help learners to pay more attention to the target language, make them better notice the gap between the current language structure and the target language structure, and ultimately affect the effectiveness of feedback.…”