The Impact of Oral Corrective Feedback on Immediate Uptake and Retention

Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of oral corrective feedback (CF) in the form of prompts and recasts. Four adult EFL learners participated in the study. While the teacher provided corrective feedback in the form of recast for two of them, two of the participants received prompts which allowed them to correct their own mistakes. After finding the distribution of uptake following different types of corrective feedback, the study attempted to find whether recasts and prompts had differential effects on retention of the corrected items. Data included treatment session transcriptions and grammatically judgement tests, which were designed for each participant on the basis of their own errors and were administered two weeks later. Results indicated that recasts and prompts didn’t affect the retention of corrected items differently when the participants tried to correct their previous errors. However, the participants were able to identify the correct forms in the statements when they were asked to judge their grammaticality.