The impact of recasts and clarification requests on the L2 learning of regular and irregular past tense

الملخص EN

There is no consensus in the corrective feedback literature regarding the most effective type of corrective feedback.

This study examined the impact of two types of implicit feedback (recasts and clarification requests) in learning the simple past tense in English.

The simple past tense is seen as problematic for L2 learners due to its complexity and because of the mixture of regular and irregular verbs.

The study was conducted with 67 female Saudi second-year secondary school students who were placed into three groups (24 in a clarification requests group, 22 in a recasts group and 21 in a control group).

After a pretest, the participants attended six 45-minute treatment sessions over two weeks, and were followed up with a posttest.

The results showed that: a) all groups struggled to use simple past tense forms accurately in the pretest; b) the recasts and clarification requests groups outperformed the control group in the posttest; c) the recasts and clarification requests groups performed more accurately in the posttest than in the pretest; d) the recasts group outperformed the clarification requests group in the use of irregular past forms; and e) all groups performed more accurately in the use of regular past forms than in the use of irregular forms in both the pretest and the posttest.