This study investigates the effects of the types of tasks and feedback on Korean adult EFL learners' fluency, accuracy, and complexity. A qualitative approach was also added to determine the perceptions that learners and teachers have about task-based instruction (TBI) and feedback types with learning journals, interviews, and stimulated recall. Although the experiment had the limitations of a small size of subjects and short length, certain findings are worth noticing. For both levels of group learners (lower intermediate and higher intermediate), fluency was highest in the descriptive tasks receiving implicit feedback. For accuracy, the rate was highest when both groups performed descriptive tasks receiving explicit feedback. For complexity, only higher intermediate level learners showed substantially higher rates in narrative tasks with explicit feedback. Planning time and the freedom to choose the topic (picture to describe) presumably might have affected fluency and accuracy in descriptive tasks. Accuracy was found to have been more affected by explicit feedback that primarily provided corrections on morphosyntactic errors. In addition, the qualitative research on the perceptions that L2 learners and teacher had about their experience with TBI and feedback provides insightful perspectives that are hoped to contribute to designing more effective TBI and interactional corrective feedback. (201)
Syntactic priming effect is defined as a tendency that speakers are more likely to use the syntactic structure in the case that the same structure was used in a preceding sentence compared to the case in which a different syntactic structure was used in a preceding sentence. The purpose of the study is to investigate the difference of the syntactic persistence between young and adult EFL learners. Also, the present study investigated the implicit learning effect. Participants consist of three groups: elementary school students, middle school students, and university students. For the implicit learning effects, each participant took part in the experiment three times with an interval with ten days. As a result, the salient priming effects and implicit learning effects were observed in university students. Weak effects were shown for middle school students and the weakest effects for the elementary school students. Especially, the priming effects on passive and double object dative structure were not observed for the elementary school students, weak for the middle school students, and strong for the university students. The results imply that young EFL learners who are in lack of cognitive prerequisite on L2 linguistic forms are limited to both the priming effects and implicit learning effects. Pedagogically, the young learners who are in lack of cognitive prerequisite knowledge require more explicit instruction for L2 grammar.