Abstract:
This study investigates the effect of four types of oral corrective feedback, namely, explicit elicitation, implicit elicitation, explicit recast and implicit recast on the most commonly mispronounced phonological features among Iranian EFL learners through immediate uptake and retention. Five classes were randomly categorized into four experimental groups and one control group, each with 18 intermediate-level male learners. The treatment was conducted in the form of a retelling task in nine sessions. During the feedback sessions, the learners’ uptake was recorded. The learners’ retention was also perused in one immediate and one delayed post-test. The results revealed that those learners who received explicit recast obtained the highest score in terms of correct uptake, and that the groups performed differently across different time periods. The learners’ scores enhanced over time; however, the increase then leveled off and even dropped in the delayed post-test in all the experimental groups except for the group which received explicit elicitation, apparently leading to more retention of the target phonological features. The study offers insights to teachers regarding the effect of recast and elicitation in their explicit and implicit form on L2 pronunciation.
Machine summary:
Effect of Oral Corrective Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners’ Phonological Uptake and Retention Amin Naeimi, Ph. D Candidate, Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran naeimi@iauyazd.
edu Abstract This study investigates the effect of four types of oral corrective feedback, namely, explicit elicitation, implicit elicitation, explicit recast and implicit recast on the most commonly mispronounced phonological features among Iranian EFL learners through immediate uptake and retention.
Keywords: Corrective feedback, recast, elicitation, uptake, retention Introduction Sounds play an important role in communication, and language teachers are required to take due heed of teaching pronunciation in their classrooms.
Their study revealed that although recasts were the most frequently used method of correction (55% of cases), they were the least effective method in eliciting learners’ accurate immediate uptake, while the other types of feedback including elicitations, repetitions and clarification requests resulted in more successful student-generated repair.
Leeman (2003) studied 74 learners of L2 Spanish who were engaged in communicative interaction with her as the teacher; she came to the conclusion that only groups that received recast and enhanced-salience of positive evidence could significantly outperform the control group in the post-test, and that the implicit negative evidence could not play a major role in the learners’ language development.
Rassaei, Moinzadeh and Youhanaee (2012) studied the effects of two types of corrective feedback, namely recasts and metalinguistic feedback, on the acquisition of implicit and explicit knowledge by 86 Persian EFL learners via timed and untimed grammaticality judgment tests and an elicited oral imitation test.