This quasi-experimental study investigated the potential benefits of two corrective feedback techniques (recasts and prompts) for learners of different proficiency levels. Sixty-four students in three intact grade 6 intensive English as a second language classes in the Montreal area were assigned to the two experimental conditions-one received corrective feedback in the form of recasts and the other in the form of prompts-and a control group. The instructional intervention, which was spread over a period of 4 weeks, targeted third-person possessive determiners his and her, a difficult aspect of English grammar for these Francophone learners of English. Participants' knowledge of the target structure was tested immediately before the experimental intervention, once immediately after it ended, and again 4 weeks later through written and oral tasks. All three groups benefited from the instructional intervention, with both experimental groups benefiting the most. Results also indicated that, overall, prompts were more effective than recasts and that the effectiveness of recasts depended on the learners' proficiency. In particular, high-proficiency learners benefited equally from both prompts and recasts, whereas low-proficiency learners benefited significantly more from prompts than recasts. The last 10 years have witnessed a steady increase in the number of studies that have examined the effects of corrective feedback~CF! on second lan-guage~L2! learning+ This includes both descriptive and experimental research This study is based on the first author's Ph+D+ research~Ammar, 2003!+ We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the participating teachers and students+ We thank Patsy Lightbown, Roy Lyster, Pavel Trofimovich, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their valuable input and feedback on earlier versions of this paper+

The merits of recasts have been widely debated and investigated in and out of the language classroom. This quasi-experimental study examines the impact of recasts in comparison to prompts and no corrective feedback on francophone learners' acquisition of English third person possessive determiners. Sixty-four students from three intact intensive English as a second language classes carried out 11 communicative activities during which they received corrective feedback according to the condition they were assigned to. An oral picture-description task and a computerized fill-in-the-blank task that kept record of participants' latency to retrieve the correct forms were administered prior to the treatment and immediately after it ended. Four weeks later the oral picture description task was readministered. Analyses of individual participants' oral data revealed that prompts were more effective than recasts and no corrective feedback in helping learners move up to more advanced stages of a developmental possessive determiner scale. This was especially apparent for low-proficiency learners. Data from the computerized task showed that prompts allowed learners to retrieve possessive determiner knowledge faster than recasts.

No abstract

This quasi-experimental study investigated the noticeability and effectiveness of three corrective feedback (CF) techniques (recasts, prompts and a combination of the two) delivered in the language classroom. The participants were four groups of high-beginner college level francophone learners of English as a second language (ESL) ( n = 99) and their teachers. Each teacher was assigned to a treatment condition that fit his CF style, but the researcher taught the controls. CF was provided to the learners in response to their production problems with the simple past and questions in the past. While the noticing of CF was assessed through immediate recall protocols, learning outcomes were measured by way of picture description and spot-the-differences tasks administered through a pre-test/post-test design. The results indicated that the noticeability of CF is dependent on the grammatical target it addresses (i.e. feedback on past tense errors was noticed more) and that the CF techniques that push learners to self-correct alone or in combination with target exemplars are more effective in bringing out the corrective intent of the feedback move. In relation to the learning outcomes, the past tense accuracy levels increased more than those for questions, but the differences between the two targets were not significant across groups.

This study investigated the relationship between pre-service English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their actual teaching practices. To determine the nature of this relationship, 99 teachers-in-training with little or no teaching experience were asked to complete a questionnaire seeking information about their teaching beliefs, particularly about oral corrective feedback (i.e. teachers’ responses to students’ language errors). The teachers’ responses were subjected to an exploratory factor analysis which revealed several dimensions underlying their beliefs. To examine how these beliefs affect classroom performance, 10 of the teachers were first asked to indicate how they would correct language errors illustrated in hypothetical (videotaped) classroom scenarios and were then observed teaching an authentic ESL class. The classes were video-recorded and 30-minute teacher-fronted communicative segments from the lessons were analysed for the number and type of errors learners made and the teachers addressed. Results indicate a multifarious relationship between stated beliefs and actual teaching practices in that while the teachers corrected fewer errors than they believed they would, they preferred the same corrective techniques in both hypothetical and actual teaching situations. Most notably, the study suggests that the complexities of the language classroom and the pre-service teachers’ lack of experience at integrating theoretical knowledge and practical skills, lead them to behave overall as native-speaking interlocutors, not as language teachers. Implications for teacher training are discussed.