The Impact of Teacher’s Implicit versus Explicit Corrective Feedback on Learning L2 grammar by Iranian English learners

This study aimed to investigate the impact of oral corrective feedback on acquiring simple past tense and quantifiers by Persian EFL learners in spring 2012. In an experimental design (two experimental groups and a control group), 90 low-intermediate learners of second language English performed communicative tasks (spot different test) during which they received either recasts (implicit feedback) or metalinguistic explanation (explicit feedback) in response to any utterance that contained an error in the target structure. Acquisition was measured by means of a multiple choice test .The test was administered prior to the instruction, 1 day after the instruction, and again 2 weeks late. Statistical comparisons of the learners’ performance on the immediate and delayed posttest showed a clear advantage for explicit feedback over implicit feedback.