Oral corrective feedback effect in the pronunciation of regular verbs

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate whether oral corrective feedback improves learners’ accuracy in the pronunciation of regular verbs. A group of 23 fourth year of high school students of English as a foreign language participated in a quasi-experiment. The participants were divided in three groups; group 0 (G0 control group), group 1 (G1 explicit group), and group 2 (G2 implicit group). In the pre-test, participants were asked to read aloud a short story with 9 regular verbs in it. In the first and second treatment session, participants were asked to read aloud in pairs a dialogue with 15 regular verbs in it. In each session G1 received oral explicit corrective feedback (CF) with metalinguistic explanation, and G2 received oral implicit CF in form of recast in the correction of errors in the pronunciation of regular verbs in simple past tense. In the post-test, the participants were asked to read a short story with 9 regular verbs in it. Pronunciation accuracy was evaluated with checklists from which data was collected. The data was statistically analysed with nonparametric tests; Friedman, Kruskall Wallis, and U. Man-Whitney. The results in the post-test showed a statistically significant difference between testing times for the G1 and G2, across the 3 groups, and between G0 and G1, G0 and G2, G1 and G2. It might be concluded that oral CF improves learners` accuracy in the pronunciation of regular verbs, and that oral explicit CF is more appropriate to correct learners’ errors regarding form.