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Corrective feedback takes the form of responses to learner utterances that contain an error. The responses can consist of (a) an indication that an error has been committed, (b) provision of the correct target language form, or (c) metalinguistic information about the nature of the error, or any combination of these.
There has been a growing interest in the role of corrective feedback in SLA in the last decade. A number of descriptive studies based on data collected in classrooms (e.g., Panova & Lyster, 2002; Sheen, 2004) and on data collected in a laboratory-type setting (e.g., Iwashita, 2003; Mackey, Oliver, & Leeman, 2003; Philp, 2003) have examined the types of corrective feedback received by learners and the extent to which this feedback is noticed, or uptaken, or both by the learners. Experimental studies have attempted to examine the contribution that corrective feedback makes to acquisition (e.g., Ayoun, 2004; Han, 2002; Leeman, 2003; Lyster, 2004). This research has addressed, among other issues, the relative efficacy of implicit and explicit types of corrective feedback.
THEORETICAL ISSUES
A distinction can be drawn between implicit/explicit learning and implicit/explicit knowledge . In the case of learning, the term implicit refers to "acquisition of knowledge about the underlying structure of a complex stimulus environment by a process that takes place naturally, simply and without conscious operations," whereas explicit learning is "a more conscious operation where the individual makes and tests hypotheses in search for a structure" (N. Ellis, 1994, p. 2).
In the case of knowledge, the term implicit refers to knowledge that learners are only intuitively aware of and that is easily accessible through automatic processing, whereas explicit knowledge consists of knowledge that learners are consciously aware of and that is typically only available through controlled processing. Explicit knowledge might be linked to metalinguistic labels. These two types of knowledge are not mutually exclusive; that is, speakers can hold implicit and explicit representations of the same linguistic feature, as, for example, in the case of linguists who formulate explicit rules on the basis of their implicit knowledge of a language.
Schmidt (1994) stated that "implicit and explicit learning and implicit and explicit knowledge are related but distinct concepts that need to be separated" (p. 20). It can be argued,...