This paper examines the effectiveness of corrective feedback on learners of the Japanese language. The current study had a total of 25 students who agreed to participate, consisting of both advanced and intermediate levels. There are six main types of corrective feedback established and defined by Lyster and Ranta (1997), this study focused on two particular types, recast (a category of implicit) and elicitation (a category of prompt). Comparing a particular feedback or a category of feedback with another has been one of the ongoing topics in the field of second language (L2) learning.
The present study is intended to examine which feedback works better for the learners in terms of repairing their mistakes and to investigate which learner group shows a better effect on each feedback. The results suggest that elicitation is more beneficial to L2 learners than recast in reformulating their utterance. The reason for this is likely that elicitation is not as implicit as recast; thus, the learners had a better opportunity to notice elicitation that was given when they made a mistake. Interestingly, this outcome also provided a comparison between the advanced and intermediate groups. Both repaired their mistakes more after elicitation was given, but the advanced group did better. Since each group displayed almost the same moderate rate of repairing for recast, what truly differentiated one group from the other was elicitation. This result suggests that learners who have more knowledge of the target language will benefit from elicitation
