Corrective Feedback Interventions and EFL Learners’ Pronunciation: A Case of –s or –es Ending Words

Abstract

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the impact of two corrective feedback techniques (recasts and prompts) on students’ performance in pronunciation. Seventy-two students from SAMA High School in Ardabil were assigned as the participants of this study. The data were collected from 3 classroom-based studies; the two experimental conditions – one received corrective feedback in the form of recasts and the other in the form of prompts – and a control group. The instructional intervention, which was spread over a period of two weeks, targeted the final –s and –es endings pronunciation, a difficult aspect of English pronunciation for these learners. To measure the students’ prior knowledge of the targeted pronunciation, a pre-test was designed. Immediate post-tests were administrated after the treatments. Delayed post-tests were administrated 2 weeks after the immediate post-test. Fill-in-the-blank, oral picture-description, and read-aloud tasks formed the materials of this study. Comparison of group means across testing sessions using a one-way and repeated measure ANOVA consistently revealed that corrective feedback conditions had a positive effect on the learners’ pronunciation accuracy. The effects of recasts were greater than those of prompts for increasing accuracy in the targeted pronunciation of final English –s and –es ending words.

Keywords: Corrective feedback, Recasts, Prompts, Pronunciation, Oral accuracy.