Recasts, metalinguistic feedback, anxiety and grammatical development in EFL: A case study with young learners
Evangelia Paraskeva & Eleni Agathopoulou
This case study investigated the relationship between oral corrective feedback (OCF) and language learning anxiety in the acquisition of the regular past tense morpheme -ed and the subject-verb agreement morpheme –s in EFL. The participants were two Greek L1 eleven-year-old female twins at an A2 level of English language proficiency. A language anxiety test and interview data showed that one of the twins was a low-anxiety learner while the other was a high-anxiety learner. The teaching interventions lasted for two weeks, providing corrective feedback on the target structures during 8 oral story-retelling tasks. Results from pre-tests, immediate post-tests and delayed post-tests (which contained an untimed grammaticality judgment test and an oral imitation test) showed that the low- anxiety learner benefited from metalinguistic feedback whereas the high-anxiety learner benefited from recasts in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement. On the other hand, there was no statistically significant improvement in the acquisition of the past tense morpheme –ed. Our findings comply with previous studies which indicate that implicit OCF (recasts) may be more beneficial to high-anxiety learners, while explicit OCF (metalinguistic) may be more helpful for low-anxiety learners.This case study investigated the relationship between oral corrective feedback (OCF) and language learning anxiety in the acquisition of the regular past tense morpheme -ed and the subject-verb agreement morpheme –s in EFL. The participants were two Greek L1 eleven-year-old female twins at an A2 level of English language proficiency. A language anxiety test and interview data showed that one of the twins was a low-anxiety learner while the other was a high-anxiety learner. The teaching interventions lasted for two weeks, providing corrective feedback on the target structures during 8 oral story-retelling tasks. Results from pre-tests, immediate post-tests and delayed post-tests (which contained an untimed grammaticality judgment test and an oral imitation test) showed that the low- anxiety learner benefited from metalinguistic feedback whereas the high-anxiety learner benefited from recasts in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement. On the other hand, there was no statistically significant improvement in the acquisition of the past tense morpheme –ed. Our findings comply with previous studies which indicate that implicit OCF (recasts) may be more beneficial to high-anxiety learners, while explicit OCF (metalinguistic) may be more helpful for low-anxiety learners.
Key words: Oral Corrective Feedback, language anxiety, young EFL learners, recasts, metalinguistic feedback, subject-verb agreement, simple past tense