The short-term effects of individual corrective feedback on L2 pronunciation

This article investigates the effect of explicit individual corrective feedback (ICF) on L2 pronunciation at the micro-level in order to determine whether ICF needs to complement listening only interventions. To this purpose, the authors carried out a study which investigated the immediate effect of feedback on comprehensibility of controlled speech production by L2 learners. 169 adult learners of German were assigned to two groups, one exposed to listening only activities (listening to their own recorded pronunciation and listening to teachers' model pronunciation) and the other receiving ICF in addition to the listening activities. Immediately before and after the respective interventions, the participants read a text, and two experienced judges rated in a blind and randomized rating task whether they could determine differences between the comprehensibility of the pre-test and post-test samples. The results show that ICF was more effective than listening only interventions in improving L2 comprehensibility. The study thus concludes that ICF is a significantly more powerful teaching tool than listening only activities.