Effects of Form-Focused Practice and Feedback: A Multisite Replication Study of Yang and Lyster (2010)

Abstract

We conducted a multisite replication of Yang and Lyster's (2010) study investigating the effects of recasts and prompts on learning English regular and irregular past tense. Our study was conducted with intact high school and vocational school classes in Italy and Bosnia. Our participants were young adolescents (14–15 and 16–17 years old), a population that has been largely ignored in second language acquisition (SLA) research. We followed the design of the original study, but we also included a few modifications regarding the elicitation materials. The findings from our study did not fully align with Yang and Lyster's results. We found no effect of group and no evidence of the superiority of either prompts or recasts in either written or oral data in either Bosnia or Italy. However, we found a steady increase in scores over time from pretest to posttests in oral data in all groups at both sites.