The effects of elicitation on students' accurate production of English past tense forms in communicative story-telling tasks

A small-scale experimental study following a pre-test post-test design was carried out in order to study the effects of a type of corrective feedback, elicitation, on the acquisition of the English past simple test. Due to problems with the research design and the low number of participants taking part in all sessions of the study, we were unable to find conclusive evidence for this. However, when focusing on the treatment sessions, we did find indications of positive effects of elicitation on students¿ performance during story telling tasks. It appears that the production of a structure which has been previously studied and of which students possess high explicit knowledge can be positively affected by elicitation. As there was a high rate of repair after elicitation focusing on past-tense errors, it seems that these intermediate students¿ past tense errors were not the result of a lack of knowledge, but rather of the difficulty of applying this knowledge in online communication tasks. There was also some evidence that the students' immediate performance improved and that they were starting to monitor their own past-tense use, even without needing interference from the teacher, as some of them started to self-correct their errors. Nevertheless a questionnaire administered at the end of the study shows that the students were not consciously aware of the focus of the study, as only one student indicated that he improved his ability to talk in the past. This same questionnaire indicates that most of the students thought the experiment was about improving their speaking skills, which means that the provision of immediate corrective feedback does not have to interfere with the communicative focus of a lesson.