The effects of corrective feedback on english as a foreign language learners’ acquisition of past simple regular and irregular forms in the portuguese context

Abstract

Corrective feedback (CF) is a common practice in the foreign language classroom and constitutes a topic of interest for both language teachers – who have to decide whether to correct their students, when and how – and for L2 researchers – who are interested in testing the efficacy of CF techniques in L2 acquisition. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the results from a study on the effects of three corrective feedback strategies – recasts, prompts and explicit correction – on the acquisition of English past tense regular and irregular forms. 151 9th -grade Portuguese students (and their 5 teachers) took part in the study and were tested in a pretest-posttest design. Results will be presented and discussed in this paper as we seek to contribute to the debate about the effects of CF on L2 acquisition.