Questão 66926

A PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics is designing a research project to investigate the effectiveness of different types of corrective feedback in the L2 writing classroom. She wants to compare three feedback conditions: (1) Direct corrective feedback, where the teacher explicitly corrects the students' errors; (2) Indirect corrective feedback, where the teacher indicates an error has been made (e.g., by underlining it) but does not provide the correct form; and (3) Metalinguistic corrective feedback, where the teacher indicates the error and provides a clue about its nature (e.g., 'wrong tense' or 'word choice'). The PhD candidate needs to choose a research method that can rigorously test the hypothesis that some feedback types are more effective than others for long-term improvement in grammatical accuracy. Her supervisor advises her against a simple one-shot study and recommends a more robust, longitudinal design. The supervisor quotes a text on research methods in SLA: 'To investigate the effectiveness of pedagogical interventions, a quasi-experimental design is often the most feasible and powerful method in real classroom settings. This involves using pre-tests, post-tests, and delayed post-tests to measure learning over time, and including a control group to account for maturation effects. While true random assignment may be difficult, this design allows for a more confident attribution of learning gains to the intervention itself.'

Based on this advice, which of the following research designs is the most methodologically sound for this investigation?