Oral corrective feedback in second language classrooms

Abstract—This quasi–experimental study, conducted in English–as–a–foreign–language (EFL) classrooms at the university level in Iran, is aimed at investigating whether corrective feedback (CF) could enhance grammatical accuracy in the learners ’ speech; and if it could, which type of CF is more effective than the other one. The 96 participants of the study, who were selected out of 169 freshmen students on the basis of a written pretest, took a picture description test the results of which were the criterion for their random divisions into three homogeneous groups. Whenever language learners in two experimental groups made any grammatical errors during the study, consistent CF, recast for one group and prompts for the other one, was provided for them and students in the third group, who functioned as the control group, received no CF for their morphosyntactic errors. Analysis of the results in the posttest revealed significant differences between the two CF groups and the control group on the one hand and between the recast and the prompts groups on the other hand. These results suggested that though the provision of two CF types significantly increased accuracy in the use of present forms of the verb ‘to be ’ and the syntactic agreement associated with ‘–s inflection’, the remarkable outperformance of students in the prompts group over the other two groups indicated the relative efficacy of this type of CF. Index Terms—focus on form, recast, prompts, grammatical accuracy I.