The Effects Of Corrective Feedback On Learners’ Acquisition Of English “Articles” In Senior High School

Mastering English “articles” is a difficult task for English learners, especially for Chinese English learners for the absence of function words “articles” in Chinese language. Moreover, the English “article” errors made by Chinese English learners are widespread. A lot of previous studies indicate that corrective feedback made by English teachers plays an important role in language teaching class. Which type of feedback provided by English teacher is more effective in promoting the acquisition of English “articles” has been debated more. In addition, the empirical studies focused on the effects of different types of feedbacks on the second language acquisition in senior high school are few, especially on the learners’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge. Therefore, this study tries to explore which type of feedback is more effective for English learners’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge in senior high school especially in the course of learning English “articles”.The study aims to answer the following research questions. The first question is whether direct written corrective feedback(DCF) has effect on learners’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of English “articles”; the second question is whether metalinguistic explanation feedback(ME) has effect on learners’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of English “articles”. The third question is which type is better in the effect that DCF and ME have on the acquisition of implicit and explicit knowledge of English “articles”. This study was carried out in Hongqi Senior High School of Chifeng,Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The experimental subjects are the students of Class 1, Class 2 and Class 12 of Grade 1, with the total number of 136 students. Class 1 with 45 students and Class 2 with 47 students were treated as the EG(experimental groups) and class 12 with 44 students was used as the CG(control group). The two experimental groups adopted different types of corrective feedback respectively. The study mainly analyzed with one-way ANOVA and paired sample T-test by SPSS 17.0 to know the accuracy rate of English “articles”. The effectiveness of direct written corrective feedback and metalinguistic explanation in promoting students’ English learning especially in learning explicit and implicit knowledge of English “articles” has been basically confirmed by doing the experiment and analyzing the data. The analysis shows that direct written corrective feedback has effect on EFL learners’ acquisition of explicit knowledge and no significant effect on learners’ implicit knowledge. However, the metalinguistic explanation has effect on EFL learners’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge. At the meanwhile, this study showed that the ME group(Sig<.01) performed better than the DCF group(Sig<.05) not only in the post-test of the Error Correction Test but also the immediate pot-test and the delayed test. Therefore, both DCF and ME have effect on the accuracy improvement in terms of the explicit knowledge while only the ME have effect on the accuracy improvement in terms of the implicit knowledge.Following the analysis and discussion, relevant findings and some pedagogical suggestions are put forward. Corrective feedback plays an important role in the process from noticing to output through interlanguage. In order to improve the students’ learning, English teachers should often provide various types of feedback in the course of teaching. What’s more, English teachers can adopt metalinguistic explanation feedback in order to offer more absorbable and comprehensible information, which contributes to students’ knowledge internalization. The study also provides a reference in adopting different types of corrective feedback in terms of the English teacher.