“That’s wrong. It is pronounced /æŋˈzaɪətɪ/”: corrective feedback, foreign language anxiety and pronunciation development

Abstract

Although there is a well-documented body of research on what type of corrective feedback (CF) works best for students’ EFL development, little is known about the individual differences that may interfere in such corrections and hence, in their EFL acquisition. The study reported in this paper aims to investigate the extent to which students with high and low foreign language anxiety (FLA) benefit from recasts and metalinguistic feedback on the pronunciation of the past tense morpheme (-ed) and how they respond to the feedback. To this purpose, 30 twelve-year-old Spanish students of English (A2+ level) at a secondary school were divided into six high- and low-anxiety groups according to scores they obtained in an abbreviated version of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS). Then, in a pre- and post-experimental design, recasts were administered to two high- and low-anxiety groups during the treatment sessions, metalinguistic feedback was provided to two other high- and lowanxiety groups, and the high- and low-anxiety control group did not receive any feedback for their errors. The findings showed that corrective feedback has a positive effect on the learners’ pronunciation of the –ed. Particularly, the results seem to make a case for the effectiveness of recasts for correcting pronunciation and for increasing the rate of repair. Regarding FLA, although there are clear trends that insinuate an impact on the students’ performance, the role of anxiety on error correction and on the students’ responses could not be statistically identified in this analysis. These findings suggest that pronunciation-focused recasts might be particularly effective for anxious and non-anxious students’ FL pronunciation development. In addition, it is advised that an EFL pedagogy that is mindful not only of the type of corrective feedback, but also of the students’ degree of anxiety may have a beneficial effect on their foreign language acquisition