  Citation: Ioannou, Sophia, and Dina Tsagari. 2022. Effects of Recasts, Metalinguistic Feedback, and Students’ Proficiency on the Acquisition of Greek Perfective Past Tense. Languages 7: 40. https:// doi.org/10.3390/languages7010040 Academic Editor: Elena Babatsouli Received: 21 October 2021 Accepted: 13 January 2022 Published: 21 February 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). languages Article Effects of Recasts, Metalinguistic Feedback, and Students’ Proficiency on the Acquisition of Greek Perfective Past Tense Sophia Ioannou 1, * and Dina Tsagari 2 1 School of Modern Greek, University of Cyprus, Nicosia 1678, Cyprus 2 Department of Primary and Secondary Teacher Education, Faculty of Education and International Studies, 0167 Oslo, Norway; dina.tsagari@oslomet.no * Correspondence: ioannou.k.sophia@ucy.ac.cy Abstract: The role of interactional corrective feedback in second language assessment has attracted both teachers’ and second language researchers’ interest, as they are concerned with when corrective feedback can be implemented to assist second language acquisition. This quasi-experimental inter- vention study aims to investigate the impact of two corrective feedback types, namely recasts and metalinguistic feedback, and students’ proficiency in the acquisition of the Greek perfective past tense. The sample consists of ten adult beginners’ classes (n = 86 students) of the Modern Greek Language Teaching Center of the University of Athens. The classes were randomly assigned to three treatment conditions: (a) recast; (b) metalinguistic feedback; (c) no feedback and participated in form-focused production activities. A grammaticality judgment pretest and posttest were administrated to measure participants’ development on the explicit knowledge of perfective past tense morphology. After the treatment, participants were divided in the database into high and low beginner students based on their performance on a placement test administrated prior to the treatment. Results revealed that the groups that received corrective feedback outperformed the control group, while no statistical significance was found between the two treatment groups. Moreover, high-beginner learners bene- fited equally from both feedback types, whereas low-beginner learners benefited significantly from metalinguistic feedback. Keywords: interactional feedback; form-focused instruction; recasts; metalinguistic feedback; Greek as a second language 1. Introduction In the field of testing and assessment, formative assessment (FA) is often defined as a process of assessing learning, modifying teaching according to information gathered from teachers and students’ activities, and promoting learning with the aim of improving learners’ competence (Black and Dylan 1998; Turner 2012). Inappropriate use of FA because of misunderstanding of the concept of FA seems to lead to limited learning opportunities and low-quality teaching. Even though FA has been implemented successfully in a number of countries (Asghar 2010; Brookhart et al. 2010; Hume and Coll 2009; Taras 2008; Tarnanen and Huhta 2011; Wang 2008), FA-related research in the area of second or foreign language (FL/L2) learning is still limited (Rea-Dickins 2004, 2008), especially in the Greek context (Ioannou 2020; Ioannou and Tsagari 2022). Some of the basic techniques of enacting FA are ‘observation’, ‘questioning’, as well as ‘feedback provision’. In terms of the later, different types of feedback have been identified in the literature. Corrective feedback (CF), in particular, has been defined as “any teacher behavior that attempts to inform the learner of the fact of error” (Chaudron 1988, p. 150). CF has been in the heart of second language (L2) acquisition and pedagogy for the past three decades as it preoccupied both teachers and researchers. As Ellis (2017) put it, CF constitutes an “interface issue” that brings together the concerns of teachers and researchers. Languages 2022, 7, 40. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7010040 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages