The effect of metalinguistic feedback on grammatical accuracy of EFL learners

The present study investigated the effect of metalinguistic explanation (ME) on learners’ written accuracy in terms of regular and irregular simple past tense. Twenty-eight Azari learners of English participated in this study. After taking a proficiency test they were divided into a ME group (errors underlined + description of error) and a control group (no feedback). The study lasted for 7 weeks. Each session learners were given a topic to write 151 words about it and the next session their writing was returned to them. The second author underlined the error of ME group and wrote the explanations on top of the errors. The control group did not receive any corrective feedback (CF). They were only provided with general comments in the form of letters A, B, C or D. The results indicated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in using regular and irregular past tense

Keywords:

Error correction , grammatical accuracy , written corrective feedback , metalinguistic feedback