The relative effectiveness of mixed, explicit and implicit feedback in the acquisition of English articles

This article reports on a study that compares the effectiveness of three oral negative feedback types in the acquisition of English articles. A mixed feedback treatment, in which learners' errors were corrected, first, through explicit feedback, then through implicit feedback, was compared to implicit-only (i.e., recasts) and explicit-only (i.e., explicit correction) feedback treatments. The study followed a pretest/posttest/delayed posttest experimental design. Eighty English-as-a foreign language learners, whose proficiency level ranged from beginner to intermediate, were randomly assigned into explicit-only feedback, implicit-only feedback, mixed feedback, reduced-explicit feedback and no-feedback control groups. The learners and researcher met two times for the treatment sessions. In each treatment session, the learners and researcher carried out three oral production tasks, where learner errors on the English indefinite and definite articles were treated according to their group assignments. The differences between the groups in performance were measured using oral production tasks. The results of the study revealed that the explicit-only feedback and mixed feedback groups outperformed all the other groups on the immediate posttest, but there was no difference between the explicit-only and mixed feedback groups on either of the posttests. This result was interpreted as indicating that mixed-feedback can be as effective as explicit-only feedback.