This article investigates the effect of explicit individual corrective feedback (ICF) on L2 pronunciation at the micro-level in order to determine whether ICF needs to complement listening only interventions. To this purpose, the authors carried out a study which investigated the immediate effect of feedback on comprehensibility of controlled…

In a recent paper, Anthony Bruton argued that correction receives too much attention and that the debate over it (which he calls "the Truscott debate") is "a rather tedious sterile academic debate" that has harmed the field. He dismissed the case against correction, based on arguments that uncorrected students do not improve, some general…

This study investigated the relationship between immediate learner repair in response to interactional feedback and learning targeted forms. In particular, the study examined and compared the relationship between two major types of repair: learner-generated self-repair following elicitations and teacher-generated repair following recasts. It also…

The study looked at the effects of correction of learners' errors on learning of grammatical features. In particular, the manner of correction (explicit vs. implicit correction) was investigated. The study also focussed on the effectiveness of explicit and implicit correction of developmental early vs. developmental late features. Fifty-six…

This study explores how second language (L2) learners perceive indirect (hedging or indirect speech acts) and direct written teacher feedback. Though research suggests that indirect speech acts may be more difficult to interpret than direct speech acts ([Champagne, 2001] and [Holtgraves, 1999]), using indirect speech acts is often encouraged in…

Building on Sheen's (2007) study of the effects of written corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English articles, this article investigated whether direct focused CF, direct unfocused CF and writing practice alone produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by adult ESL learners. Using six intact adult ESL…

This article reports on an exploratory study of instructional issues encountered in the teaching of Mandarin as a foreign language at the university level. The research reveals the sometimes conflicting views held by teachers, researchers, students, and institutions with respect to instructional methods and types of classroom interaction,…