When is corrective feedback most likely to succeed?

The article presents findings from a comprehensive study of oral corrective feedback involving 207 classroom learners of English as a foreign language at different age and proficiency levels who elicited 1700 instances of corrective feedback. The study showed that those who are corrected profit from the correction in about 50% of all cases, as measured in a subsequent test. Their peers do better in the test, their average success rate being 60%. However, the test results of both peers and corrected learners vary in accordance with contextual and linguistic factors, such as the learnerʹs contribution to the correction sequence, the communicative focus of the deviant utterance, and the type of error corrected.