Abstract:
In terms of pedagogy, the methodological options whereby a teacher can impart grammar
knowledge to students are of two kinds: Learner performance options and Feedback options.
Although learner performance options have been an unquestionable part of English grammar
teaching in the Sri Lankan L2 classroom, feedback options are not always stringently
practiced due to various reasons. The current study explores whether one of these feedback
options -explicit corrective feedback- could be employed as an effective form of grammar
instruction, in order to improve the English language accuracy of intermediate level English
medium undergraduates.
The study while analysing the most salient errors made by 25 undergraduates of Kotelawala
Defence University, explored the impact of explicit corrective feedback on those different
error types. The methodology adopted was: i) Teacher feedback of classroom language
production tasks coupled with pre and post tests, ii ) Descriptive analysis of pre and post test
data, iii) Quantitative comparative analysis of pre and post test data by employing paired
sample t-test and multiple regression analysis of errors.
Findings revealed that out of sixteen types of lexical errors and morpho syntactic errors made
by undergraduates, errors related to Sentence structure, Prepositions, Verb agreement,
Determiners, Usage norms and formulaic expressions and Pluralisation were the six most
salient error types. Moreover, it was revealed that although explicit corrective feedback had
no significant impact on language accuracy as a whole in general class room context, it has a
significant impact on lexical accuracy (rather than morpho syntactic accuracy). Additionally,
it was revealed that the number of words per t-unit had increased after feedback. Hence, it
can be assumed that either feedback or continuous language production or both had positively
affected language complexity.
