Mixed corrective feedback and the acquisition of third person ‘-s’

Abstract

This study examines the effects of mixed oral corrective feedback (CF) on L2 learners’ oral production accuracy. Twenty-four EFL learners from two intact classes in a Turkish university participated in the study. The two classes were randomly assigned to be an experimental and a control group and completed five communicative tasks. The learners in the experimental group received mixed oral CF in response to their erroneous use of English third person ‘-s’ ending. The CF took the form of prompts and recasts; the latter were applied when the former failed to elicit the correct form, or when prompts were deemed to create awkward interruptions in the flow of conversation. Learners’ oral production accuracy was measured through an elicited imitation (EI) test and an oral narrative task. The results of the immediate and delayed posttests showed that the learners in the experimental group significantly outperformed those in the control group on the oral narrative task, but not on the EI test. The findings suggest that a combined application of prompts and recasts can improve learners’ oral accuracy of partially learned structures. © 2017 Association for Language Learning