The Role Of Corrective Feedback In Second Language Acquisition: A Classroom Observation Study Of Beginner Efl Learners

Abstract

This classroom-based action research aims to investigate the efficacy of oral corrective feedback (CF) strategies among young, elementary-level students, who are learning English as a foreign language (EFL) in Uzbekistan. The study was conducted over twelve lessons in a private language course with 15 primary school students aged 9–11. Observational discourse analysis was used to examine students’ immediate responses (uptake) and successful self-correction to different types of feedback provided by the teacher. According to the results there were clear differences between output-promoting and input-promoting strategies. While indirect recasts gave low levels of successful repair results, explicit output-promoting strategies significantly improved students’ successful repair rates. Clarification requests, elicitation, and metalinguistic feedback emerged as the most successful ways. Findings show that these strategies encourage students to not only comprehend the meaning, but also actively pay attention to the grammatical forms and help them remember and apply their existing linguistic knowledge in practice. The study provides practical recommendations for EFL education in Uzbekistan, emphasizing the importance of specific and targeted feedback strategies in developing students’ self-correction and reducing the risk of developing long-term language errors.