The Effect of Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback on EFL Learners’ Grammatical Accuracy

In everyday classrooms, teachers and their students must interact with each other on many levels. High communication abilities are required in order to teach and motivate these students effectively. Therefore, feedback is an important part of the teaching and learning. There are different kinds of feedback. The present study was designed to investigate the effect of metalinguistic feedback on grammatical accuracy among Iranian L2 learners. Sixty learners from Sahand language Institute in Miandoab after taking grammatical judgment test which was administered to homogenize them, were placed in two control and experimental groups. The experimental group, received metalinguistic feedback as the treatment. The researcher corrected the learners errors related to past tense and pronoun after they finished the retelling according to principles of Jigsaw task. But learners in control group did not receive any feedback. After treatment, which lasted for six sessions, posttest was given to both control and experimental groups to observe the difference resulted from the treatment. To be sure about the significance of the difference between posttest means of both groups, a ttest was used. The results at the end showed that learners in experimental group outperformed control group. After that, other tests (pronoun and tense tests) were given to the learners in both control and experimental groups. The data collected was computed through ttest which revealed that the effect of metalinguistic feedback on accuracy of tense is greater than pronoun. The findings of this study can be helpful for language teachers and teacher trainers.