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This article reports on a mixed methods study that investigated the extent to which written corrective feedback (WCF) contributes to L2 learners’ acquisition of regular past tense in English and the cognitive processes that underpin the corrective feedback provided. The study adopted a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design and involved 113 intermediate-level Chinese learners of English who were assigned to four conditions: indirect WCF, direct WCF, metalinguistic WCF, and control. A picture description task and a grammaticality judgement test were used to measure gains in the target structure. To explore how learners process feedback, nine learners, three from each treatment group, were selected to produce think aloud protocols. The study found that all three types of WCF had a positive effect on the picture description task, though none of them had a clear impact on the grammaticality judgement test. In addition, indirect WCF was found to have an advantage over direct and metalinguistic WCF on the delayed posttest, when compared to the control group. Think aloud data suggested that indirect WCF induced deeper cognitive processes than the other two kinds of feedback, which may account for the superiority of indirect WCF.

The facilitative role of corrective feedback (CF) in second language (L2) acquisition has been attested in numerous empirical studies. However, despite the increasing popularity of video-supported tools in language education, few studies have examined the effectiveness of CF delivered through video chat. To address this gap, the current study investigated the effect of explicit and implicit corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of third person singular –s in a video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) environment. Fifty-six Chinese learners of English were recruited and randomly assigned to three experimental conditions: explicit CF, implicit CF, and control. They completed two interactive tasks over two treatment sessions during which CF was delivered through video chat to the two treatment groups. The effect of CF treatment was assessed by an untimed grammaticality judgement task and an oral elicited imitation task at the time of pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest. The results indicated that the two treatment groups outperformed the control group on both assessment tasks and that there was no significant difference between the two treatment groups. These results point to the benefits of CF in video-based SCMC and challenge the superiority of explicit CF over implicit CF.