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In 2006 in a shift of methodology, distinguished between the implicit and explicit knowledge tests, Rod Ellis, Shawn Loewen, and Rosemary Erlam examined the effects of metalinguistic and recast feedbacks on the acquisition of regular past tense, – ed, in lower-intermediate students.

They used three instruments from a battery of five implicit and explicit tests which at first Ellis (2004, 2005) in his psychometric studies and later, Bowles (2011) introduced as validate tests for measuring the two knowledge areas separately. These tests are designed to tap the explicit and implicit knowledge by manipulating awareness, type of knowledge, self-report, learnability, systematicity and certainty of second language knowledge, the type of processing and accessibility of knowledge, and use of second language knowledge (Bowles, 2011).

Ellis and his advocates in this empirical study (2006) have chosen 34 participants with mean age of 25 years from a private language school in New Zealand. They assigned the participants, mostly from East Asia origin, in one control and two

experimental groups. The result of the study shows that explicit corrective feedback in the form of metalinguistic information, on the whole, outperformed implicit corrective feedback in the form of recast. In particular, explicit corrective feedback appears more probable to enhance learning.

The study, by using different instruments and methodology in measuring implicit and explicit knowledge separately, shed new light on the field of corrective feedback and overcomes the deficiencies of previous studies. It precisely shows the effects of recast and metalinguistic feedback on ―past tense‖ understanding. However,

the relative effects of recast and metalinguistic information on errors of other English structures, especially those known to be problematic for lower-intermediate learners still need further studies (Ellis et al., 2006).

Afterwards, the debate over corrective feedback in SLA continued still even in recent years (e.g., Falhasiri, Tavakoli, Hasiri, & Mohammadzadeh, 2011; Fawbush, 2010; Goo, 2012; Rassaie & Tavakoli, 2011; Rezaei & Derakhshan, 2011; Sato, 2010; Shintani & Ellis, 2013; Varnosfadrani & Basturkmen, 2009; Yang & Lyster, 2010). The findings of these studies did not show any consensus on the effectiveness of corrective feedback, particularly recast and metalinguistic information which are the focus of this study.

Falhasiri et al. (2011) in a joint study investigated two types of error, explicit description of interlingual errors and implicit clarification of intralingual errors on writing compositions of 23 undergraduate students both male and female with different majors. Frequency of students‘ errors based on the linguistic category in their writings was examined. The findings of this study show that explicit corrective feedback has formed a condition in which the students could compare the target forms with their present interlanguage forms to internalize them into their interlanguage systems. So it

that intralingual errors, although in a slightly less degree than interlinguals, also reduced after the implicit corrective feedback of target features.

Fawbush (2010) studied the impacts of implicit versus explicit corrective feedback on middle school ESL students in Minnesota. Eleven students 12 to 13 years old, mostly from Somalia, Cambodia, Korea, Vietnam and Argentina were divided into two groups, namely the recast and metalinguistic groups. The study tried to find out the impacts of the two types of corrective feedback on the acquisition of novice students over a familiar target structure instead of something entirely new. Past tense –ed was chosen as the target structure of the study. Treatment was conducted over two days, for two hours daily. Fawbush collected his data by administering the oral imitation test and metalinguistic knowledge test during pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest. The results of the tests suggest that both types of feedback are effective for L2 grammar acquisition with a slight outperformance for explicit corrective feedback. The study by distinguishing two implicit and explicit tests tried to overcome the limitations of previous studies about the efficiency of feedback type on past tense –ed. But still, because of its limited structure and participants it could not shed light on the problem.

Goo (2012) explored the relative effectiveness of recast and metalinguistic feedback on the acquisition of English that-trace filter. The study focused on the extent to which working memory capacity is related to the recast and metalinguistic feedback. Six intact classes at university level comprising 54 Korean EFL learners participated in this study and were assigned into two experimental (i.e., recast and metalinguistic) groups and one control group. The two experimental groups participated in two treatment sessions during which students were asked to participate in the tasks of the study. The tasks were designed such that students received either recast or metalinguistic corrective feedback on their erroneous utterances. A grammaticality judgment test and a written production test were administered in pretest and immediate

posttest to measure the efficacy of the two types of feedback. Results indicate that both recast and metalinguistic feedback are effective in promoting acquisition of the target construction.

Rassaei and Tavakoli (2011) in a study using tailor-made post tests investigated the efficacy of recast and metalinguistic corrective feedback on four grammatical structures, namely auxiliaries, determiners including articles, demonstratives and quantifiers, prepositions and negation. This study explores whether learners‘ gender influences the effectiveness of corrective feedback received during classroom interactions. However, the main deficiency of this study is not differentiating between recast and metalinguistic feedback and these two types of feedback were used interchangeably whenever the tasks demands and considered as corrective feedback.

Rezaei and Derakhshan in 2011 in their research examined the effect of recast and metalinguistic feedback in task-based grammar instruction. They selected their subjects according to the result of a Nelson test for intermediate, with sixty participants being randomly assigned into a control and two experimental groups. In this study conditionals and wish statements were chosen as target structures. The results of pretest, and a posttest administered after the treatment, revealed that both corrective feedback types were effective and metalinguistic feedback was more effective than recast.

Sato (2010) criticized previous studies of recast and said the lowest success rate in grammatical recasts was due to not differentiating between early development or late development grammatical structures. He categorized target grammatical structures as either early developmental (easy) or late developmental (difficult) to learn by using an established measurement based on the analysis of recasts and students‘ responses. This study examined the effect of recasts on Japanese high school students, and then explored the pedagogical implications. The study found that recasts can be effective for

grammatical features. Although this study by distinguishing between easy and difficult structures to learn tries to overcome one of the deficiencies of previous studies, it still has a limitation in the number of chances of feedback occurring for each structure.

Shintani and Ellis (2013) in an empirical study compared the impact of metalinguistic explanation and direct written corrective feedback on learners‘ implicit and explicit knowledge of the English indefinite article. The study at first investigated the impact of written corrective feedback on adult ESL learners‘ L2 implicit and explicit knowledge. Then it compared the effect of direct corrective feedback (DCF) with metalinguistic explanation (ME). The impact of these two kinds of corrective feedback was estimated by an Error Correction Test and by examining the accuracy of the target structure (the English indefinite article) in a revised text and also new pieces of writing by 49 lower-intermediate ESL learners in an intensive language course in America. The result of this study indicated that DCF had no effect on accurate use of the target feature suggesting that it benefited neither implicit nor explicit knowledge. The results also were interpreted ME helped to develop learners‘ L2 explicit knowledge, but that the

effect was not long-lasting and thus perhaps had no impact on their implicit knowledge. Learners‘ self-reports indicated that the DCF group did not develop awareness of the

rule, whereas those receiving the ME did and were able to use it when revising their original text.

Varnosfadrani and Basturkmen (2009) in an empirical work compared the significant effect of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on learner performance. In their study 56 upper-intermediate adult EFL learners participated in two experimental groups, recast and metalinguistic. Treatment included two different passages for each learner. The learners were asked to restate the passages in their own words. Then the researcher selected some of the grammatical errors of the learner in each task passage and corrected them implicitly or explicitly. The researcher depends on the learners‘

errors constructed individualized tailor-made tests. Descriptive statistics for all groups were calculated. Results revealed that explicit corrective feedback is more effective than implicit corrective feedback on acquisition of EFL learners with the preference of morphological over syntactical features. This study supports the Schmidt (1990) noticing hypothesis and recommends teachers to provide metalinguistic feedback on learners‘ errors. In this study definite article (the), irregular past tense and plural S are categorized as early developmental features and indefinite article (a, an), third person singular S, regular past tense, active/passive voice and relative clauses are categorized as late developmental features. Although this study by distinguishing different grammatical features tries somehow to overcome the limitations of past studies, but its nature did not shed light on the significant effect of corrective feedback on implicit and explicit knowledge of ESL learners.

Yang and Lyster (2010) in study involving 72 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners at university level in China examined the impacts of three different corrective feedback treatments (i.e., Prompt group, recast group and control group). The intervention program included form-focused production activity that elicited the target forms followed by immediate and delayed posttest. The result of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that corrective feedback is operational in developing language accuracy in the use of both regular and irregular past tense; however the effects of prompts were more than those of recasts in use of regular past tense forms. The result of this study confirms the needs for further studies to investigate which grammatical features would benefit from which method of corrective feedback. Although this study by using both oral and written tests tried to provide more clarification in this field of research, still the facilitative effect of each type of error correction to promote implicit and explicit knowledge is not clear yet.