Linguae &: Rivista di Lingue e Culture Moderne (Jul 2017)
The Impact of Feedback Types on Farsi Speaking EFL Learners’ Recognition and Production of Relative Clauses
Abstract
The present study compared the impact of metalinguistic feedback, explicit feedback, and implicit feedback on the recognition and production of relative clauses in fifty-nine intermediate Persian-speaking English learners’ performances. The three groups were matched according to the instructional time, content, and methodology and received different feedbacks on their writings for eight sessions. Analysis of the research data obtained from an immediate and a delayed 45-item multiple-choice focused grammar test and writing post-test displayed the difficulty hierarchy of learning relative clauses. Significant improvements on the immediate post-test for all groups were observed, but no effect on the delayed posttest was found. The metalinguistic feedback group, however, achieved significantly higher levels of accuracy in their use of relative clauses on the writing post-test. The findings support the Interpretability Hypothesis and the Complex Adaptive System Principles Model and suggest that metalinguistic knowledge can serve as compensatory mechanisms to the correct production of relative clauses.
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