The Effectiveness of Different Corrective Feedback on College English Learners' Acquisition of Subjunctive Mood

摘要

The study mainly investigates the effectiveness of explicit feedback and implicit feedback on college English learners' acquisition of subjunctive mood. In an experimental design (two treatment groups and one control group), 120 non-English major students completed four communicative activities during which they received either metalinguistic feedback (explicit feedback) or recasts (implicit feedback) or no feedback from the teacher in case of any erroneous utterance in the target grammar structure. Three paper tests (a pre-test, an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest) were employed to measure students' knowledge of subjunctive mood, which essentially reflected their acquisition. Results show that both explicit feedback and implicit feedback are effective in learners' acquisition of subjunctive mood and their effects can be retained for a relatively long time. Explicit feedback is proved to be even more beneficial than implicit feedback, as it can trigger more learners' noticing of the target linguistic features.