서강대학교

초록/요약

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differential effect of direct and indirect error correction with the additional supportive effect of metalinguistic explanation by corrective feedback. The target grammatical features were the counterfactual conditional and the indefinite article. Ninety-nine university students with intermediate levels of English proficiency were assigned to five groups: direct corrective feedback, indirect corrective feedback, direct corrective feedback with metalinguistic explanation, indirect corrective feedback with metalinguistic explanation, and the control group with general comments on content. These five groups completed three sets of a grammaticality judgment task and a dictogloss task as a pre-test, as an immediate post-test, and as a delayed post-test. The results showed that: 1) direct and indirect corrective feedback groups did not make any significant difference over time for the two target grammatical features, 2) the groups who received metalinguistic feedback with error correction not only outperformed the groups provided with single feedback but also maintained their improved accuracy until the delayed post-test, 3) indirect error correction with metalinguistic explanation was more effective in improving the accuracy of the counterfactual conditional while direct feedback with metalinguistic explanation was more helpful in improving the accuracy of the indefinite article. The results suggest that the efficacy of corrective feedback differs according to the nature of the target forms, and that students can benefit more from the combination of error correction, and explicit rules than merely one type of corrective feedback.