The Impact of Reflection and Metalinguistic Feedback in SLA: A Qualitative Research in the Context of Post Graduates

Some studies have examined the effectiveness of direct and indirect feedback in improving levels of accuracy and their impact on the development of writing skills among second language (L2) learners (Lalande,1982; Ferris, 1995b; Lee, 1997; Ferris and Roberts, 2001; Chandler, 2003; Bitchener, 2005; Miceli, 2006). It is concluded that the positive impact of direct/indirect feedback on the ability of foreign language learners to edit their own texts and improve their accuracy in writing. The present study hopes to build on these studies by investigating the role of metalinguistic feedback in encouraging and preparing L2 learners to improve their level of accuracy and fluency in SLA. At the end of the experiment, the results seem to indicate that metalinguistic feedback in the form of error/contrastive analyses is the most effective way to help ALEs improve their accuracy and fluency as well.