CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING CLASSROOMS

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CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE
TEACHING CLASSROOMS
Presented by G. Bahar Otcu

• The 2004 Advanced SLA Class Symposium
• Part 1
• April 28, 2004

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I. INTRODUCTION

• a number of experimental and observational
  studies on error treatment in SLA (Allwright and
  Bailey, 1991 Chaudron, 1988 De Keyser, 1993
  Aljaafreh and Lantolf, 1994)

- borrowed Hendricksons questions (1978) 1.
Should learners errors be corrected? 2. When
should errors learners be corrected? 3. Which
errors should be corrected? 4. How should errors
be corrected? 5. Who should do the correcting?
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- We still do not have exact answers to these
questions (Lyster and Ranta, 1997)

• dilemma (Allen et. al, 1990)
• Teachers do not correct errors ss
  opportunities to connect form and function are
  reduced
• Teachers correct errors flow of
  communication is at risk of interruption

• Van Liers (1988) conversational and didactic
  repair distinction two negotiation
  functions
• conversational negotiation of meaning
• didactic negotiation of form

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II. ASSUMPTION AND PURPOSE
Assumption In communicative classes, where
negotiation of meaning is central, teachers use a
variety of corrective feedback to focus on
linguistic form.
Purpose What are the different types of
corrective feedback that are used in
communicative teaching classrooms?
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III. METHOD

• Data Collection
• - observational study
• one intermediate level ESL classroom
• instruction mainly communicative
  information/opinion gap/jigsaw tasks, reading
  comprehension activities
• video-recording and observing two sessions
  equaling 4 hours
• transcribing the instances of corrective
  feedback
• coding by using a formerly used coding scheme

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• Data
• Teacher
• female speaker of English from Greece
• has taught for almost a year
• taught a more advanced-level class previously
• willing to be observed and video-taped
• unaware of research focus
• Students
• ten students in total
• from a variety of backgrounds 4 Asian, 4 South
  American, 2 European

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• Data Analysis
• coding scheme developed by Lyster and Ranta
  (1997)
• coded utterances with error, excluded
  hesitations etc.
• errors were categorized as phonological,
  grammatical, lexical and L1 errors.
• Types of Feedback
• 1. Explicit correction
• S Make-up used to be more beautiful.
• T Err, its not a correct sentence. Make-up?
  People used to be more beautiful.

2. Recasts S Have you always being eating
lunch? T Have you always eaten?
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3. Clarification requests S His dog was
hanging by a /thriyd/ T Say the last word
again?
4. Metalinguistic feedback S know - knew -
know T Is she right?
5. Elicitation S They had a dog. T They ?
6. Repetition S Which is verb sometimes. T
Which is verb?

• 7. Multiple feedback
• recast metalinguistic feedback
  explicit correction
• elicitation recast / explicit
  explicit correction

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IV. RESULTS
Errors
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Corrective Feedback
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V. DISCUSSION
- mainly grammatical and phonological errors,
followed by lexical and multiple errors
- major corrective feedback type recasts,
followed by explicit correction and repetitions
- least used feedback type clarification
requests, and metalinguistic feedback, followed
by elicitation
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Focus types of corrective feedback provided by
T BUT the data
Other Observations effectiveness of corrective
feedback
learner uptake a students utterance that
immediately follows the Ts feedback and that
constitutes a reaction in some way to the Ts
intention to draw attention to some aspect of the
students initial utterance (Lyster Ranta, 1997)
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• all feedback types but recasts 100
  learner uptake
• data limited, but in line with previous research
  findings
• teaching implication variety of feedback types,
  not only recasts

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• In addition
• some errors left untreated
• untreated errors, mainly grammatical errors not
  inhibiting meaning. E. g.
• S I want to become as she. This is ideal.
• from time to time, students self-corrected
  themselves
• BUT
• - not generalizable to every classroom situation
  because not focus of this study and requires
  further investigation

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CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE
TEACHING CLASSROOMS
Presented by G. Bahar Otcu

• The 2004 Advanced SLA Class Symposium
• Part 1
• April 28, 2004