Corrective Feedback Interventions and EFL Learners¡¯ Pronunciation: A Case of ¨Cs or ¨Ces Ending Words

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the impact of two corrective feedback techniques (recasts and prompts) on students¡¯ performance in pronunciation. Seventy-two students from SAMA High School in Ardabil were assigned as the participants of this study. The data were collected from 3 classroom-based studies; the two experimental conditions ¨C one received corrective feedback in the form of recasts and the other in the form of prompts ¨C and a control group. The instructional intervention, which was spread over a period of two weeks, targeted the final ¨Cs and ¨Ces endings pronunciation, a difficult aspect of English pronunciation for these learners. To measure the students¡¯ prior knowledge of the targeted pronunciation, a pre-test was designed. Immediate post-tests were administrated after the treatments. Delayed post-tests were administrated 2 weeks after the immediate post-test. Fill-in-the-blank, oral picture-description, and read-aloud tasks formed the materials of this study. Comparison of group means across testing sessions using a one-way and repeated measure ANOVA consistently revealed that corrective feedback conditions had a positive effect on the learners¡¯ pronunciation accuracy. The effects of recasts were greater than those of prompts for increasing accuracy in the targeted pronunciation of final English ¨Cs and ¨Ces ending words.Keywords- Corrective feedback, Recasts, Prompts, Pronunciation, Oral accuracy.