Strategies of Metalinguistic and Recast Feedback during Oral Interactions

Abstract

Corrective feedback has attracted much attention in recent years, this with a particular emphasis on meaning-focused language instruction. In order to compare the effectiveness of the strategies of metalinguistic and recast feedback on student uptake during oral interactions, an eight-week non-experimental study was conducted. This study comprised thirty participants distributed in two classes. One group of 16 students was exposed to metalinguistic feedback and the other group of 14 students to recast. The selected students were aged from 18 to 20 year-old and were attending the eighth course of the English Foreign Language Program in a public university in Ecuador for one semester. To compare the effectiveness of the two aforementioned feedback strategies, four target structures were adopted: omission of subject, auxiliary use in questions, subject-verb agreement, and reported statements. The structures emerged from a survey which was administered to a sample of EFL teachers from the Language Center of the university. The findings of the study revealed that learners who were exposed to metalinguistic feedback outperformed their counterparts who were exposed to recast feedback.

Keywords

• corrective feedback
• metalinguistic
• oral interactions
• recast
• student uptake