Noticeability of corrective feedback, L2 development and learner beliefs

This quasi-experimental study sought to investigate the often assumed yet little investigated relationship between noticing of corrective feedback (CF) and L2 development in relation to learner beliefs about error correction. Specifically, it aimed to (1) uncover the noticeability and effectiveness of three CF techniques (namely, recasts, prompts, a combination of the two) (2) to determine a relationship between noticing of CF and learning of the past tense and questions in the past, and (3) to determine whether learner beliefs about CF mediate what is noticed and learned in the language classroom. The participants were four groups of high-beginner college level francophone ESL learners (n = 99) and their teachers. Each teacher was assigned to a treatment condition that fit his CF style, but the researcher taught the controls. CF was provided to learners in response to their production problems with the simple past and questions in the past. While noticing of CF was assessed through immediate recall and questionnaire responses, learning outcomes were measured by way of picture description and spot the differences tasks administered through a pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test design. Learner beliefs about CF were probed by means of a 40-item questionnaire. To elicit the learner and teacher perspectives on the study, semi-structured interviews were held with the three teachers and 20 learners, drawn randomly from the participating classes. The results indicated that the noticeability of CF is dependent on the grammatical target it addresses (i.e., feedback on past tense errors was noticed more) and that the feedback techniques that push learners to self-correct alone or in combination with target exemplars are more effective in bringing out the corrective intent of a feedback move. In relation to the learning outcomes, the overall past tense accuracy increased more than that for questions, but there were no differences between the groups. The direct link between noticing and