The effectiveness of written corrective feedback in the acquisition of the English article system by Polish learners in view of the counterbalance hypothesis

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to investigate the effectiveness of written error correction based on the principles of the Counterbalance Hypothesis [Lyster and Mori (Studies in Second Language Acquisition 28:321–334, 2006)]. The hypothesis assumes that learners’ ability to notice the gap between the ill-formed utterance produced in their interlanguage and the target linguistic form is enhanced by the shift in their attentional focus from meaning to form in a meaning-focused context and from form to meaning in in a form-oriented setting. Thus, instructional activities such as corrective feedback should act as a counterbalance to the classroom’s predominant orientation and are predicted to be more effective than interactional feedback which is congruent with the predominant foreign language teaching methodology. The study examines the differential effect of two types of written corrective feedback (CF) and the extent to which the type of foreign language instruction mediates the effects of CF on the acquisition of articles by adult intermediate Polish learners of English (N = 59). Four research groups were formed: (1) a direct-only correction group taught inductively, (2) a direct-only correction group taught deductively, (3) a direct meta-linguistic correction group taught inductively, and (4) a direct meta-linguistic correction group taught deductively. The study revealed that all the treatment groups outperformed the control group on the immediate post-tests, and the direct meta-linguistic group taught inductively performed significantly better than the remaining research groups. The results also showed that written CF targeting a single linguistic feature improved the learners’ accuracy, especially when meta-linguistic feedback was provided and the learners received the inductive type of formal instruction (FI).