Effects of corrective feedback on L2 acquisition of tense-aspect verbal morphology

In this study, the effectiveness of implicit corrective feedback was examined with a group of 30 sixteen-year-old English native speakers learning French, who received either recasts or clarification requests on errors they made with the passé composé and the imparfait. The control group did not receive any feedback. Overall, the results indicate that recasts were more effective in improving accuracy of form and use for both the passé composé and the imparfait. However, an examination of language development with reference to the Aspect Hypothesis and the inherent lexical aspect of verbs showed that no change occurred between the pretest and the posttests. The passé composé was associated exclusively with achievement verbs, whereas the imparfait was limited to several frequent irregular stative verbs and a few activity verbs.