Abstract
This study examined the differences in the learning of wh- and yes/no question forms of Taiwanese university learners of English across the four conditions of a two-by-two experimental design. The two independent variables included learner agency (performers/active vs. observers/passive) and corrective feedback (CF) type (prompts vs. recasts). Those participants categorized as performers completed two tasks in a synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) environment via Skype in which an English native speaker (NS) provided either recasts or prompts in response to question form errors. Those participants categorized as observers, on the other hand, completed the same two tasks while being passively exposed to video recordings of the interaction sessions. Prompts and recasts were defined as in Lyster (2004). A pretest, posttest, delayed posttest design was used to evaluate the learning outcome based on the two dependent measures: accuracy and fluency. The tests all involved question form elicitation which was timed and recorded via Microsoft PowerPoint. Fluency was operationalized as the average response time while accuracy was operationalized according to a formula which deducted points for grammatical errors in question formation. The potential implications of this line of research in terms of distance learning of English as a foreign/second language are discussed.