The Repository @ St. Cloud State

Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

6-2018

Culminating Project Type

Thesis

Degree Name

English: Teaching English as a Second Language: M.A.

Department

English

College

College of Liberal Arts

First Advisor

John P Madden

Second Advisor

Choonkyong Kim

Third Advisor

Hung-Chih Yu

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Keywords and Subject Headings

Interactional Feedback English Grammar Perception Chinese Students

Abstract

Interactional Feedback is one crucial strategy that is widely implemented by language teachers in real classrooms, but there is no agreement about the effectiveness of different types of feedback on students learning. This study compared the different perceptions and different effectiveness of recasts and prompts on acquisition of past tense. Fifteen Chinese English learners and three language teachers were recruited from a university in the Midwest region of the U.S. Each teacher was responsible for helping five participants complete three tasks: the Interaction Task, the Retelling Task, and the Stimulated Recall Task. During the Interactional Task, each participant would complete three picture stories with the teacher under three conditions: recast, prompt and no feedback, respectively. Then, students were asked to retell the story immediately after the interaction with the teacher. Finally, the researcher of the study guided students to complete the Stimulated Recall Task to measure their perceptions of the different feedback conditions. After analyzing the Interactional Task and the Stimulated Recall Task, the results indicated that students were more successful in perceiving the target of recasts than prompts. For the effectiveness of the three conditions, the Friedman Test showed there was not a significant difference among recasts, prompts, and no feedback conditions that promoted participants to a better acquisition of the past tense. The findings of the study suggest the extent of effectiveness of feedback might be affected by variation of students. Therefore, ESL teachers should take students’ different backgrounds and learning experiences into account while choosing the personalized or tailored feedback for students.

Comments/Acknowledgements

First and foremost, praises and thanks to the God, the Almighty, for His showers of blessings throughout my thesis to complete my thesis successfully.

I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to my thesis chair Dr. John P Madden, for providing invaluable guidance throughout the process. His vision, sincerity and motivation have deeply inspired me. It was a great privilege and honor to work and study under his guidance. I am extremely grateful for what he has offered me.

I am extremely grateful to my parents for their love, caring and sacrifices for educating and preparing me for my future. I am very much thankful to my husband Yipeng Li his love, understanding, prayers and continuing support to complete my thesis. Also, I express my thanks to my friends for their support and valuable prayers.

I would like to say thanks to my committee members Dr. John P Madden, Dr. Choonkyong Kim, and Dr. Hung-Chih Yu for your valuable feedback and suggestions.

Finally, my thanks go to all the people who have supported me to complete my thesis work directly or indirectly.

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