Effects of Oral Corrective Feedback on L2 Development: An Educational Perspective

This paper reviews the effects of oral corrective feedback (CF) in second language (L2) development with focus on Chinese EFL learning. It reports research studies on the theoretical issues related to CF including the implications of recast and prompts. It also discusses the efficacy of feedback in relation to grammatical structures reported in literature in the past two decades. It was observed that there is paucity of studies that investigated the effect of feedback on different grammatical structures. Many studies did not also show the feedback type suitable for a specific grammatical structure in L2 acquisition. This paper therefore proposes further research to explore the effect of the two CF type thus recast and prompt on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English past tense (rules-based verses exemplar-based). And this will contribute to providing empirical evidences for SLA theories and enriching the studies of SLA domain.