The Effectiveness Of Corrective Feedback On High School Learners’ Acquisition Of Subjunctive Mood

For the past decades, there is a hotly debated topic on classroom corrective feedback in the field of second language acquisition. In order to investigate the effectiveness of different types of corrective feedback, the thesis investigates the effectiveness of two different types of corrective feedback (CF)(recasts and clarification requests) on the acquisition of English subjunctive mood by high school learners. It also explores whether there is a relationship between learners’noticing of CF and the acquisition of subjunctive mood.This thesis addresses the following specific research questions:l.Do recasts and clarification requests have different effects on the acquisition of English subjunctive by high school learners? If so,which is more effective? Of the two types of corrective feedback,which one has more lasting effect than the other?2.1s there a relationship between learners’noticing of CF and the acquisition of subjunctive mood?Pretests, immediate post-tests and delayed post-tests were used to obtain the scores. This experiment lasted nine weeks The present study is conducted in No.4Middle School of Zhuzhou in Hunan Province.30students from two classes,15boys and15girls, are involved in this study. All learners are randomly divided into three groups, namely a recast group, a clarification requests group and a control group. Each group is made up of10students,5male and5female across the groups. Learners’noticing of recasts and clarification requests is assessed through stimulated recall.The quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS13.0.In addition,the author used paired-samples T Test, descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, Independent-Samples T test to measure the effects of the CF. The major findings are as follows:1.The results show that in the posttests,both types of corrective feedback are effective for high school learners’acquisition of English subjunctive mood than control group. At the same time, the results in posttests indicate that recasts is not more effective than clarification requests in short term while there is a significant difference for clarification requests over recasts in long term.2. The thesis reveals that clarification requests acquire more learner’s noticing than recasts, though the difference between the two is not significant. The results also show that there is a positive relationship between the learners’noticing of CF and the acquisition of English subjunctive mood. That is, the learners who notice the corrective intent of the CF do better than those who do not.Based on the above conclusions, the pedagogical implications of the present study for second language teaching and learning are explored. Teachers need to be systematic and consistent in their provision of feedback, and the corrective feedback should be clear enough to be perceived. Teachers should offer more opportunities to learners to notice the gap between the target structure and their utterance.