The Impact of Oral Corrective Feedback on Immediate Uptake and Retention

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of oral corrective feedback (CF) in the form of recasts and prompts on English language learners' immediate uptake and retention. The study consisted of four instruction sessions over a period of four weeks. Four A2 level EFL learners participated in this case study. While the instructor 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. The data of the study included treatment session transcriptions and acceptability judgement tests which were designed for each participant on the basis of their own errors and were administered after a two-week time interval. The study revealed that clarification request and metalinguistic explanation always led to uptake whereas the prompts least likely to lead to uptake were repetition, which resulted in uptake 86 percent of the time, and elicitation, which led to uptake 92 percent of the time. The results also indicated that recasts and prompts didn't affect the retention of corrected items differently when the participants tried to correct their previous mistakes. However, all the participants were able to identify the correct forms in the statements substantially when they were asked to judge their acceptability. (c) Association of Applied Linguistics. All rights reserved