Abstract

This article addresses one of the frequent problems in pre-service teachers of English in Chile: the omission of suffix –s in the third person singular during the writing of an academic text. It has been observed that the grammatical competence of these prospective teachers is insufficient to meet the demands of academic writing. This issue reveals a situation that is shared by students who show proficiency in their communicative competence but not in their grammatical competence. The prospective teacher of English as a Foreign Language should master both competences. Therefore, attention should be equally given to both. The paper also describes the usefulness of corrective feedback strategies, specifically indirect focused corrective feedback with metalinguistic clues to address specific, frequent grammatical problems, such as the omission of suffix -s in students who show advanced proficiency in their communicative competence.