ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
Educational Psychology Perspectives on Cognitive Load and Written Corrective Feedback: Enhancing Past Tense Acquisition in L2 Learning
Provisionally accepted
- 1Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China
- 2Urban Vocational College of Sichuan, Chengdu, China
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Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) serves as an essential pedagogical tool for improving learners' written accuracy and grammatical development. While most previous studies have focused on adult or tertiary-level learners, limited attention has been given to senior high school students in non-native English contexts. This study addresses this gap by examining the effects of three WCF types direct, indirect, and metalinguistic on the development of the English simple past tense among 180 Pakistani senior high school students. Participants were divided into four groups (three experimental and one control) and completed a series of picture-based story-writing tasks over five weeks. Each writing session lasted 30 minutes with a 150–180-word limit. Grounded in Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), the study investigated how different feedback types interact with learners' cognitive processing during language production. Statistical analyses using non-parametric alternatives to mixed-design ANOVA (Kruskal–Wallis and Conover–Inman tests) revealed significant differences across feedback types and testing phases. All WCF types led to improvements in learners' past tense accuracy compared to the control group, with metalinguistic feedback showing the most substantial immediate gains, and indirect feedback demonstrating stronger long-term retention on delayed posttests. These findings suggest that feedback type influences both the efficiency and durability of grammatical learning outcomes. The study contributes theoretically by integrating CLT and Krashen's Input Hypothesis to explain how WCF functions as cognitively manageable input (i+1) and pedagogically by emphasizing the importance of aligning feedback type with learners' cognitive readiness and proficiency level.
Keywords: Cognitive Load Theory, Past tense acquisition, Second Language Acquisition, Senior high school Learners, Written corrective feedback
Received: 05 Sep 2025; Accepted: 05 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Rasool, Qian and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ushba Rasool
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