An Empirical Study Of English Teachers’ Metalinguistic Feedback On Junior High School Students’ Explicit And Implicit Knowledge Of Third Person Singular Verbs

With the development and innovation of the second language classroom teaching concept,the traditional teacher-centered teaching model has gradually transformed into a student-centered teaching model.Effective communication between students and teachers has become a hot topic among language scholars.In classroom interaction,the quality of a teacher’ utterance directly affects students’ language acquisition and the development of their abilities.As the major component of classroom discourse,oral corrective feedback plays an increasingly important role in English classes.Therefore,in recent years,more and more researches on oral corrective feedback have been conducting by domestic and foreign language scholars.Among the different forms of corrective feedback,metalinguistic feedback,as an effective method,however,has received little attention.A few studies have focused on the influence of metalinguistic feedback on students’ explicit knowledge acquisition and the results of these studies were positive.While the empirical studies on students’ implicit knowledge were extremely limited.In fact,implicit knowledge takes larger proportion than explicit knowledge in English examinations.Implicit knowledge should be paid more attention foreign language scholars.The grammar third person singular verbs is often misused by junior high school students both in their spoken English and written English.In order to solve students’ difficulties in learning the third person singular verbs,this paper aims at exploring the following three questions:1.Does metalinguistic feedback promote learners’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge on the third person singular verbs?2.What are the differences between the effects of metalinguistic feedback on learners’ acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge on the third person singular verbs?3.What is the students’ and the teachers’ attitude towards corrective feedback?The participants of this study were 90 students and two young English teachers from Class 13 and 15 of a junior high school in Fuzhou City,Fujian Province.Before the experiment,Class 13 was selected as the experiment class,while Class 15 as the control class.In the process of the experiment,the two groups were trained the knowledge of the third person singular verbs through short passage retelling and sentences correction.They completed the tasks at the same time but received different corrective feedback.After eight weeks,a posttest was conducted,and the data was collected and analyzed by SPSS 24.0.The results show that:(1)Metalinguistic corrective feedback can help students acquire explicit and implicit knowledge on the third person singular verbs;(2)Metalinguistic feedback has different effects on the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge of the third person singular verbs,which manifested that after the metalinguistic feedback,the effect on explicit knowledge is significant,while the effect on implicit knowledge is not significant.(3)The students hold positive attitude towards oral corrective feedback and expect different forms of corrective feedback from teachers.The teachers also state that oral corrective feedback is an indispensable part in English classroom.The present research provides further support for the effectiveness of oral corrective feedback especially metalinguistic feedback on junior high school English grammar teaching.And it indicates the method that applying metalinguistic feedback in English classroom enables students to obtain new knowledge with high efficiency and accuracy.By adopting this method,the teachers help students build a correct grammar knowledge system and strengthen the knowledge through efficient class communication.