1. Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center
Helping Students Achieve Speaking Proficiency through Corrective Feedback
Thomas Bacon
Defense Language Institute
Foreign Language Center

2. “One of the most frustrating tasks for L2 teachers is that of constantly correcting the same errors.” (Agudo, 2012, p 123)

3. Corrective Feedback
Corrective feedback (CF) – “any feedback provided to a learner, from any source, that contains evidence of learner error of language form. It may be oral or written, implicit or explicit.” (Russell & Spada, 2006, p. 134).
A researcher (Li, 2010) considers CF a very important defining feature of interaction.
Author and researcher Rod Ellis (2009, p. 11 ) says CF “is an integral part of teaching.”

4. Feedback
CF works best when it occurs at the time the learner makes the error. (Ellis, 2009)
CF facilitates language acquisition. (Van Patten, 2003)
CF is an important aspect of L2 pedagogy. (Nassaji and Kartchava, 2017)

5. Mistake v Error
Error – when the deviation arises as a result of lack of knowledge (reasons: never learned the correct structure, was never taught the structure, never paid attention to corrections, etc.)
Mistake – happens during performance, when learner knows the correct structure but experiences a “slip” of the tongue and therefore makes a mistake.

6. Mistake v Error What defines an error?
-- Grammaticality (how well-formed the structure is)
-- Acceptability (if the structure is acceptable to native speakers)
(Ellis, 2012)
3 broad categories of errors:
-- developmental (similar to errors in L1 acquisition)
-- interference (reflect the structure of L1)
-- unique (neither developmental nor interference)
(Dulay & Burt, in Ellis, 2012)

7. Recasts
Recasts are well suited to communicative classroom discourse, because they tend not to interrupt the flow of communication, keep students’ attention focused on meaning, and provide scaffolds that enable learners to participate in interaction that requires linguistic abilities exceeding their current development level. (Lyster et al., 2013, p. 10)

8. Feedback Feedback can be positive or negative.
Positive feedback -- an affirmation of the learner’s response to an activity is correct (veracity of content or linguistic correctness of the utterance)
Negative feedback – “a signal of the lack of veracity of the learner’s utterance or linguistic deviance.” Negative feedback is corrective in intent (correct errors or not?, what errors to correct?, how to correct them?, when to correct them?, etc.).
(Ellis, 2009)

9. Forms of CF
CF is a response to learner utterances that contain error. The responses can consist of “(a) an indication that an error has been committed, (b) provision of the correct target language form, or (c) metalinguistic information about the nature of the error, or any combinations of these.” (Ellis et al., 2005, p. 340)

10. Uptake
Feedback is effective only when it results in uptake followed by a successful repair. (El-Tatawy, 2012)
Repair
Uptake
Feedback

11. Uptake
Uptake – “a student’s utterance that immediately follows the teacher’s feedback” (Lyster & Ranta, 1997, p. 49)
Repair – “the successful production in the TL of the linguistic item where the error had occurred” (Mendez et al., 2010, p. 266)
“Accordingly, the real challenge for teachers is to make sure that their corrective feedbacks are actually noticed and understood on the part of the learners.” (Agudo, 2012, p. 124)

12. CF Techniques Lyster & Ranta (1997) Al-Faki & Siddiek (2013)
Ellis (2009)
OCF_Strats

13. Taxonomy See Mendez et al. for types and examples, pp. 263)
See Ellis p. 9 for CF strategies and p. 14 for guidelines for CF.
See taxonomy p. 9 of Ellis (2009).

14. Oral Corrective Feedback Strategy
CF Taxonomy
Oral Corrective Feedback Strategy
What the Corrector
Does
Example
Recast
Incorporates the content words of the immediately preceding incorrect utterance and changes and corrects the utterance in some way (e.g., syntactic, phonological, lexical, or morphological)
L: Were you surprising by anything in the article?
T: Were you surprised by anything in the article?
Explicit Correction
Indicates an error has been committed, identifies the error, and provides the correction.
L: On May.
T: Not on May. In May. We say, “It will start in May.”
Repetition of Error
Repeats the learner’s utterance, highlighting the error by means of emphatic stress.
L: I going to visit my parents next week.
T: I going to…(emphasis)
L: I’m going to…
Al-Faki & Siddiek (2013); Ellis (2009), Lyster & Ranta (1997)

15. Oral Corrective Feedback Strategy
What the Corrector
Does
Example
Elicitation
Repeats part of the learner utterance but not the erroneous part and uses rising intonation to signal the learner should complete it.
L: I’ll come if it will not rain.
T: I’ll come if it …?
Meta-lingustic (Paralinguistic) Feedback
Uses a gesture or facial expression to indicate that the learner has made an error.
L: Yesterday I go cinema.
T: (gestures with right forefinger over left shoulder to indicate past)
Clarification Request
Indicates that he/she has not understood what the learner said.
L: What do you spend with your wife?
T: What?
Al-Faki & Siddiek (2013); Ellis (2009), Lyster & Ranta (1997)

16. A Little Practicum I am studying ESL since last month.
Did you saw a movie last night?

17. Attitudes towards CF
In a survey of languages of 8 different language groups at an American university, Loewen et al. (2009) found that foreign-language learners of Arabic, Chinese, and various LCTL whose L1 for the most part was English had the most positive attitudes towards CF and grammatical accuracy.

18. Benefits of CF
Can draw learners’ attention to the gap between their output and target-like norm (Mendez at al., 2010), thus facilitating the occurrence of noticing of the gap
Noticing is the “first step in language building” (Schmidt, 2001, p. 31, in Hosseini, 2012, p. 99)
In their research studies, Doughty & Varela (1998, in Ellis, 2009) and Sato & Lyster (2012) compared the effects of instructional activities with and without CF, and both found the effects to be greater with CF than without. [recast used in both studies.]

19. Benefits See Lyster et al for effectiveness of CF pp 15-21.
Error correction is often used to ensure that learners accurately use what they have just been taught. (Mendez et al. 2010)
CF enables learners the chance “to make a cognitive comparison between their interlanguage and the given input” (Ellis, 1994, in Sato & Lyster, 2012, p. 593)

20. Benefits
Gives learners the opportunity “to self-correct their initial erroneous utterances” (Sato & Lyster, 2012, p. 593)
“Avoids reenforcing wrong knowledge structures” (Anderson & Schunn, 2000, in Sato & Lyster, 2012, p 594)
“By engaging in practice, execution of a skill (e.g., accurate L2 speech) eventually becomes automatized such that attention is no longer necessary.” (Sato & Lyster, 2012, p. 596)

21. Benefits
“enables learners to acquire grammatical properties that would otherwise be lost due to the fact that they do not have continued access to learning principles.” (Ellis, 2012, p. 627)

22. Benefits
A meta-analysis of 33 studies (Li, 2010) examining the effects of CF found a “medium overall effect for CF and the effect was maintained over time” (p. 309).
In his study of adult EFL students in a university in Saudi Arabia, Algarawi (2010) found that all students receiving CF showed significant improvement in their learning.

23. Benefits
“Other research has shown that explicit CF is more effective than implicit feedback (Ellis, 2006; Varnosfadrani & Basturkmen, 2009). Given these findings, it is important to explore ways in which language learners can be exposed to both implicit and explicit CF in order to foster their L2 development.” (Bower, 2011, p. 45)
“beneficial to L2 learning because it enables learners to acquire grammatical properties that would otherwise be lost due to the fact that they do not have continued access to learning principles.” (Ellis, 2012, p. 627)

24. Benefits
Lyster, 2012, p. 596)
Correct all errors (global, affecting overall sentence organization; e.g., wrong word order, missing or wrongly placed sentence connectors) or focused (local, affecting single elements in a sentence; e.g., grammatical functors, morphology)? (Ellis, 2009)

25. Benefits