The effects of implicit and explicit feedback on EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy; the case of regular past tense in English

This quasi-experimental study was an attempt to examine the effects of two types of corrective feedback, namely recast and metalinguistic feedback on the acquisition of English regular past tense-ed by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 45 female learners of English at a low intermediate level were randomly selected as the participants of this study and were assigned into two experimental groups and one control group. The experimental groups received recast and metalinguistic for-focused feedback on the target form following picture description tasks while the learners in the control group received no feedback. The acquisition of regular past tense-ed was measured by means of metalinguistic knowledge and oral imitation tests. The results of the one-way ANOVA showed that the experimental groups who received corrective feedback outperformed the control group who did not receive any feedback. The findings of the study also indicated that there were no significance differences between the two types of corrective feedback in terms of learners’ performance in an EFL context. The results of this study are considered to be useful in error correction techniques, syllabus and task designers especially in EFL contexts.