Oral Corrective Feedback in Second Language Classrooms.

TL;DR: The authors reviewed research on oral corrective feedback (CF) in second language (L2) classrooms, revealing a tendency for learners to prefer receiving CF more than teachers feel they should provide it.

Abstract: This article reviews research on oral corrective feedback (CF) in second language (L2) classrooms. Various types of oral CF are first identified, and the results of research revealing CF frequency across instructional contexts are presented. Research on CF preferences is then reviewed, revealing a tendency for learners to prefer receiving CF more than teachers feel they should provide it. Next, theoretical perspectives in support of CF are presented and some contentious issues addressed related to the role of learner uptake, the role of instruction, and the overall purpose of CF: to initiate the acquisition of new knowledge or to consolidate already acquired knowledge. A brief review of laboratory studies assessing the effects of recasts is then presented before we focus on classroom studies assessing the effects of different types of CF. Many variables mediate CF effectiveness: of these, we discuss linguistic targets and learners' age in terms of both previous and prospective research. Finally, CF provided by learners and the potential benefits of strategy training for strengthening the role of CF during peer interaction are highlighted.

Summary

1. Introduction

• Corrective feedback (CF) has been defined simply as ‘responses to learner utterances containing an error’ (Ellis 2006: 28) but also as a ‘complex phenomenon with several functions’ (Chaudron 1988: 152).
• This research increasingly suggests that CF plays a pivotal role in the kind of scaffolding that teachers need to provide to individual learners to promote continuing L2 growth.
• In an oft-cited study, Gass, Mackey & Ross-Feldman (2005) concluded that ‘interaction may not be as context-dependent as some researchers have claimed and may not vary depending on whether the participants are in the classroom or the laboratory’ (p. 601).

2. CF types

• Based on their descriptive study of teacher–student interaction in French immersion classrooms, Lyster & Ranta (1997) identified six different CF types, which they subsequently classified into two broad CF categories: reformulations and prompts (Ranta & Lyster 2007).
• Drawing on this classification and on knowledge gained from a considerable amount of research on CF since 1997, Sheen & Ellis (2011: 594) suggested a similar taxonomy of oral CF strategies, which accounts for the distinction between reformulations and prompts as well as the distinction between implicit and explicit CF (see Table 1).
• Because, in some foreign language settings, recasts have even been found to lead to learner repair as frequently as explicit correction, they have been considered tantamount to explicit correction in those contexts (Lochtman 2002; Lyster & Mori 2006).
• Types (adapted from Lyster & Saito 2010; Sheen & Ellis 2011) prompts provide only negative evidence, whereas recasts provide not only positive but also negative evidence, if the learner perceives the feedback as an indication that an error has occurred.

3. CF frequency

• Many classroom observational studies have documented the frequency and distribution of different CF types across a range of instructional settings.
• Recasts occur most frequently in seven of the twelve contexts.
• Recasts and prompts occur with equal frequency in high school ESL in Quebec; prompts prevail in English and Spanish immersion classrooms in Senegal, EFL classrooms in a Chinese high school, and German FL classrooms in Belgian high schools.

4. CF preferences

• Investigations of learner and teacher preferences for CF have been undertaken for two main reasons: first, learner preferences can influence learning behaviours (Grotjahn 1991; Borg 2003) and, second, mismatches between teachers’ intentions and learners’ interpretations of those intentions may result in negative effects on learning (Nunan 1989).
• Research on CF preferences is important, as it informs practitioners of learners’ perspectives and, subsequently, may lead to more effective teaching practice when combined with results from the CF effectiveness research (see also Basturkmen, Loewen & Ellis 2004).
• Therefore, being immersed in the environment of the target language may play a bigger role than a learner’s foreign language learning background in determining attitudes towards CF and grammar instruction.
• In Cathcart & Olsen’s (1976) study, ESL students responded almost unanimously that they wished to be corrected, but teachers exhibited clear hesitations about doing so.

5. Theoretical issues

• Theoretical perspectives that run the gamut from cognitively to socially oriented suggest that CF is not only beneficial but may also be necessary for moving learners forward in their L2 development.
• According to sociocultural theory, CF provides learners with dialogically negotiated assistance as they move from other-regulation towards self-regulation (e.g. Aljaafreh & Lantolf 1994; Nassaji & Swain 2000; Sato & Ballinger 2012).
• Whether classroom learners are able to infer negative evidence from recasts, as predicted by the interaction hypothesis, however, depends on whether the discourse context in which the recasts are delivered enables learners to perceive them as didactic recasts, serving to disapprove the form, rather than as conversational recasts, appearing to approve the meaning.
• In his account of the output hypothesis, de Bot (1996) argued that L2 learners benefit more from being pushed to retrieve target language forms than from merely hearing the forms in the input, because retrieval and subsequent production can strengthen associations in memory.

5.1 Learner uptake

• A somewhat contentious issue in both theoretical and methodological terms is the significance of learner uptake.
• In Lyster & Ranta’s taxonomy, learner uptake was coded as either (a) utterances still in need of repair or (b) utterances with repair.
• Learner repair can be either a repetition or self-repair, and these different types of immediate repair are specific to one type of CF or another: recasts and explicit correction can lead only to repetition of correct forms by students, whereas prompts can lead, not to repetition, but either to self-repair or peer-repair.
• Other studies conducted in laboratory settings also suggest that the potential effects of recasts on L2 development may be unrelated to immediate repair (Mackey & Philp 1998; Leeman 2003; McDonough & Mackey 2006; McDonough 2007), leading Mackey & Philp (1998) to propose that repetitions of recasts ‘may be red herrings’ (p. 338). at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

5.2 New vs. partially acquired knowledge

• With respect to CF, Long (2007: 102) claimed that ‘acquisition of new knowledge is the major goal, not “automatizing” the retrieval of existing knowledge’ (see also Goo & Mackey 2013).
• In school-based learning, students need repeated opportunities to retrieve and restructure their knowledge of the target language.
• Proponents of the CF-for-new-knowledge position claim that recasts are effective because they target forms as yet unknown to learners (Goo & Mackey 2013).
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• Conversely, if response certainty is low and the response turns out to be wrong, feedback is largely ignored’ (p. 95).

5.3 CF with or without instruction

• A third contentious issue is whether research should examine CF only in isolation or also in conjunction with instruction (see Nassaji 2009; Ellis 2012; Goo & Mackey 2013).
• Some of these studies were designed to tease apart the effects of CF and those of other instructional activities, whose inclusion was based on the premise that ‘feedback can only build on something; it is of little use when there is no initial learning or surface information’ (Hattie & Timperley 2007: 104).
• As Li (2010) explained, with all groups receiving the same instruction but different CF treatments, any effects observed in the between-group comparisons must be due to the at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
• In the studies by Ellis et al. (2006) and Sheen (2007), the CF groups participated in focused tasks that were designed to encourage the use of target forms during story retelling.

6.1 Laboratory studies

• For the most part, research demonstrating the effectiveness of recasts has been conducted in laboratory settings, where variables can more easily be controlled than in classroom settings and CF can be delivered intensively in consistent ways on specific linguistic targets.
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• All CF groups significantly outperformed a control group, but no significant differences were found across the different CF treatments.
• Several reviews of recast studies are available that put recast effectiveness into perspective through reference to a range of linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, and contextual constraints (e.g. Nicholas et al.

6.2 Classroom studies

• Before addressing CF intervention studies, the authors mention two studies that examined learners’ perceptions of CF in classroom settings.
• To summarize, experimental classroom studies of CF consistently confirm that oral CF is significantly more effective than no CF and also reveal a tendency for learners receiving prompts or explicit correction to demonstrate more gains on some measures than learners receiving recasts (for similar summaries, see Sheen 2011; Ellis 2012).
• With adult ESL learners, metalinguistic feedback proved more effective than recasts (Ellis et al. 2006; Ellis 2007) and explicit corrections with metalinguistic explanations were also more effective than recasts (Sheen 2007).

7. Linguistic targets

• Research has shown that teachers and interlocutors tend to provide more CF on morphosyntactic than on other types of errors (e.g. Lyster 1998b; Mackey et al.
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• Mackey et al. (2000) speculated that learners’ apparent sensitivity to CF targeting lexical and phonological errors might be due to the fact that, compared to morphosyntactic errors, inappropriate lexical choices and inaccurate pronunciation have ‘more potential to seriously interfere with understanding’ (p. 493).
• To date, however, very few empirical studies have actually tested the acquisitional value of CF in such domains.

7.1 Grammatical targets

• Whether conducted in laboratories or classrooms, CF research has focused to a great extent on grammatical targets, reflecting the preoccupation with grammatical development in the study of SLA.
• Two of the aforementioned classroom studies were designed to examine the differential effects of CF types on different kinds of grammatical targets.
• Ellis attributed the ineffectiveness of recasts to their lack of saliency due to the shortness of the one-hour treatment and also to the shortness of the recasts themselves.
• Regular past-tense forms proved more amenable to prompts than to recasts, arguably because of the negative evidence afforded by prompts but not by recasts incorporating a nonsalient morpheme (recast of ‘shop’ is ‘shopped’).

7.2 Lexical targets

• With respect to interaction in general, Mackey & Goo’s (2007) meta-analysis demonstrated that its effects were significantly larger for lexical than for grammatical development.
• Using stimulated-recall measures and tailormade posttests to investigate which components of recasts (i.e., positive or negative evidence) benefit learners’ morphosyntactic and lexical development, she found that the noticing of positive evidence in recasts was more likely to result in immediate interlanguage changes in vocabulary than in morphosyntax.
• To successfully complete the task, the learners provided and received clarification requests if anything was unclear.
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7.3 Phonological targets

• With respect to CF in L2 phonology some studies, as reported earlier, have examined how instruction with and without recasts can facilitate L2 speech learning processes (Saito & Lyster 2012a, 2012b; Saito in press).
• Though few in number, these studies suggest that short pronunciation-focused recasts can play an important role in L2 pronunciation development, arguably because students benefit from the opportunities afforded by such recasts, first, to notice the negative evidence directed at the intelligibility of their output and, second, to practise the correct form in response to their teachers’ model pronunciation (positive evidence).
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7.4 Pragmatic targets

• Recently, some attempts have been made to investigate how teachers can use a range of CF techniques during form-focused activities to foster learners’ emerging L2 pragmatic knowledge.
• Again targeting requests, but with university-level English-speaking learners of Spanish, Koike & Pearson (2005) investigated the differential effects of explicit CF (i.e., correct response along with metalinguistic information) and implicit CF (i.e., clarification requests).
• Their study also examined the extent to which explicit instruction before input enhancement activities influences CF effectiveness.
• Unlike the aforementioned studies, both of which at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

8. Learners’ age

• In naturalistic settings, it has been widely accepted that the age at which exposure to the L2 begins is a strong predictor of the extent to which the learner ultimately attains nativelike proficiency.
• Child learners lag behind adolescent and adult learners with respect to cognitive maturity (e.g. logical and deductive reasoning, memory and processing capacities), literacy knowledge (e.g. L1 vocabulary size, phonological and morphological awareness), and experience at school (e.g. familiarity with learning L2 under minimal input conditions) (Garcı́a Mayo & Garcı́a Lecumberri 2003; Muñoz 2006).
• Seemingly at odds with this disadvantage for younger learners is Mackey & Oliver’s (2002) conclusion that CF ‘leads to development more quickly for child learners than for adults’ (p. 473).
• When using the target feature (English question forms) incorrectly, those in the experimental at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

9. Peer CF

• While research on teacher CF has evolved from observational to experimental, research on CF among L2 learners (henceforth, peer CF) has remained descriptive until recently.
• L2 learners tend to work on communication breakdowns more than when they interact with native speakers (Varonis & Gass 1985), which leads to more feedback during peer interaction (Pica et al. 1996).
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• Hence, like interaction between learners and teachers, peer interaction and peer CF seem to have positive impacts on L2 learning.

10. Conclusion

• Lyster & Ranta’s (1997) surprisingly controversial conclusion (see Long 2007) from 16 years ago still holds true: ‘Teachers might want to consider the whole range of techniques they have at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
• Classroom research is likely to yield more productive outcomes by moving away from dichotomous comparisons of CF strategies that isolate CF from other relevant instructional variables and towards an examination of combinations of CF types that more closely resemble teachers’ practices in classroom settings (as in the mixed-CF conditions in studies by Algarawi 2010 and Kartchava 2012).
• Depending on the interactional context, learners are likely to notice the corrective quality of recasts (Oliver & Mackey 2003), especially in cases where the recasts have been shortened and/or provided with added stress to highlight the error.
• This constellation evokes a complex of variables intersecting at cognitive, linguistic, and contextual levels, all of which have not only theoretical value but also practical implications for teachers who still face the timeless questions of when, what, and how to correct (e.g. Hendrickson 1978).

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Oral corrective feedback in second language classrooms" ?

This article reviews research on oral corrective feedback ( CF ) in second language ( L2 ) classrooms. Many variables mediate CF effectiveness: of these, the authors discuss linguistic targets and learners ’ age in terms of both previous and prospective research. Finally, CF provided by learners and the potential benefits of strategy training for strengthening the role of CF during peer interaction are highlighted. 

Q2. What have the authors stated for future works in "Oral corrective feedback in second language classrooms" ?

It would be timely if future research were to match the increasingly detailed information about how recast effectiveness is constrained at https: /www. cambridge. Another contextual variable ripe for further research is CF provided by peers and the potential benefits of strategy training for strengthening its role during peer interaction. Of the many avenues identified throughout this review as promising for further research, the authors recommend those most likely to invest CF research with greater educational value. The authors consider the effects of different types of CF on different types of linguistic targets to be an especially promising topic for further investigation. 

Q3. Why did the authors predict that representational and acquisitional processes would vary between regular and irregular forms?

Due to the predictable and rule-based nature of regular pasttense verbs on the one hand, and the complex and unpredictable yet highly salient nature of irregular past-tense verbs on the other (DeKeyser 1998; Ellis 2005), the authors predicted that representational and acquisitional processes would vary between regular and irregular forms. 

Q4. Why are irregular past-tense verbs more amenable to recasts than?

Given their greater noticeability, irregular forms were found to be amenable to both recasts and prompts, again because of the negative evidence afforded by prompts and also by recasts incorporating salient positive exemplars. 

Q5. Why did the researchers find irregular past-tense forms more amenable to prompts?

Regular past-tense forms proved more amenable to prompts than to recasts, arguably because of the negative evidence afforded by prompts but not by recasts incorporating a nonsalient morpheme (recast of ‘shop’ is ‘shopped’). 

Q6. Why did the two teachers prefer prompts to recasts?

the two teachers in Yoshida (2008b) reported that, although they believed prompts to be beneficial in that they give learners a chance to work out linguistic problems, they preferred giving recasts because they are conducive to maintaining a ‘supportive classroom environment’ (p. 89) and are also more efficient with respect to time management (see also Brandl 1995). 

Q7. What is the reason why the occurrences of repair after recasts were not included?

If these instances had been excluded from the analyses, occurrences of repair following recasts would have increased, as in Oliver’s (1995) study of child dyads, which showed an increase from 10% to 35% in the number of repetitions after recasts. 

Q8. Why is the coding of instances where learners have no opportunity to respond important?

The coding of instances where learners have no opportunity to respond is nonetheless important, because it serves to demonstrate, as Oliver (2000) acknowledged, ‘that the nature of whole class interactions diminishes the opportunity for students to respond to the feedback’ (p. 126). 

Q9. What are the examples of exemplary production tasks?

The science tasks creating obligatory contexts for the use of the target forms in this study provide excellent models of exemplary production tasks congruent with content area curricular objectives. 

Q10. Why is it not possible to identify the single effective CF strategy?

Because a variety of CF types is probably more effective than consistent use of only one type, it may not be necessary or even possible for researchers to identify the single most effective CF strategy. 

Q11. What is the reason why teachers prefer to work out errors on their own?

A tendency for learners with higher proficiency to prefer to work out errors on their own is understandable, because the likelihood of self-repair increases as learners become more proficient in the target language. 

Q12. Why is it important to account for the low rate of repair after recasts?

Yet because the teachers observed in classrooms with low rates of repair after recasts had used them in ways that prevented immediate repair, accounting for such instances seems critical if the research objective is to examine the overall capacity of recasts for drawing learners’ attention to form. 

Q13. What is the compelling argument that Hattie & Timperley (2007) make?

Hattie & Timperley (2007) make the compelling argument that ‘feedback has its greatest effect when a learner expects a response to be correct and it turns out to be wrong. [. . .]