Effects of oral corrective feedback combined with explicit instruction on EFL learners’ recognition and production of English requests

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of four oral corrective feedback (OCF) types, namely recast, clarification request, explicit correction, and metalinguistic clues, on the acquisition of English requests by low intermediate Vietnamese university learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) (N = 122) in the context of explicit pragmatic instruction. The control and four treatment groups received six hours of explicit instruction on English requests. Each treatment group received one of the four OCF types. Data were collected using role plays (RP), pragmatic judgment tasks (JT), and journals from the learners after each session. The results demonstrate that all five groups significantly improved their posttest performance in both the JT and RP, and these gains were retained by the time of the delayed posttest, but there were no statistically significant differences among the groups. However, Cohen’s d effect sizes indicate that metalinguistic clues produced the largest gains in the learners’ pragmatic recognition and production, while recasts produced the smallest gains for pragmatic recognition but a similar effect to metalinguistic clues for pragmatic production. The results suggest that teachers should be judicious in selecting the OCF type that suits their instructional goal and task.