Chapter 3Oral corrective feedback in the foreign language classroom: how it affects interaction in analytic foreign language teaching
Introduction
Interaction in traditional foreign language classrooms (FLCs) is a specific type of discourse, because the foreign language (FL) is both the medium and the subject of instruction. Of course, classroom interaction in itself differs from ‘real’ or ‘natural’ FL interaction outside the classroom. In this respect Edmondson and House (1993, p. 232) refer to ‘the paradox of language teaching’, pointing out the fact that in FLCs teachers are in the first place concerned with teaching their pupils how to communicate outside the FLC. It is often also argued that ‘natural’ foreign language learning outside the FLC is more effective than instructed FL learning. In secondary education in Belgium and many other European countries, the focus is mainly on the form of the FL rather than on meaning, i.e. analytic foreign language teaching (FLT). The concept ‘analytic’ is used as defined by Stern (1990, p. 94), who considers classrooms as ‘analytic’ when they are based “on some kind of analysis of the language”, whether the activities are comprised of text comprehension, vocabulary or grammar exercises.
It is in the light of the above paradox that the present study will deal with the role of oral corrective feedback. The following questions are central to this article:
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How does oral corrective feedback function within analytic FLC interaction?
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How can different kinds of oral corrective feedback be accounted for in terms of FL learning in an analytic FLT context?
These questions will be dealt with as follows. First, the role of corrective or negative feedback in both ‘natural’ and instructed FL learning will be discussed. Second, the role of oral corrective feedback in a traditional (analytic) instructional setting (the instruction of German as a foreign language in Flanders, Belgium) is explored according to discourse-analytic principles. The frequency and distribution of different kinds of oral corrective feedback together with the frequency and distribution of different types of learner reactions to the feedback—also referred to as learner ‘uptake’ (Lyster & Ranta, 1997)—will be examined. Third, in the light of the results of this study, the effectiveness of the different kinds of oral corrective feedback will be investigated with regard to FL learning opportunities in an analytic FLC environment. The effectiveness is measured on the basis of the kind of learner ‘uptake’ following the corrective feedback.
Section snippets
Corrective feedback in natural vs. instructed FL learning
The role of corrective feedback in the process of learning a foreign language is still much debated, and is closely related to the conception of the role of different kinds of language input in language acquisition (Doughty & Williams, 1998). Input can be defined as “the language, which the learners hear or read—that is, the language samples to which they are exposed” (Allwright & Bailey, 1991, p. 120), while the language the learner produces is referred to as written or spoken (learner)
Types of corrective feedback in instructed FL learning
A first type of oral corrective feedback to be discussed is the recast, which with regard to FLT could be defined as “the teacher's reformulation of all or part of a student's utterance, minus the error” (Lyster & Ranta, 1997, p. 48). The psycholinguistic idea behind it is that FL learners make an immediate cognitive comparison between their own erroneous utterance and the target language, recast by the discourse partner (Doughty & Varela, 1998; Long et al., 1998; Mackey & Philp, 1998; Saxton,
The experiment: GFL in Belgium
In Flanders (Belgium), German is the third foreign language, after French and English. FLT techniques in the Belgian secondary school system have always been mainly analytic, often with an emphasis on grammar and error correction (Lochtman, 1997). The database analysed in this paper included tape-recordings of 12 lessons totalling 600 min or 10 h taught by three teachers, with the same teaching activities, text comprehension and grammar exercises. The recordings were made in the fifth year of
Discussion and conclusion
On the basis of the results the first question, i.e. how oral corrective feedback functions within traditional FLC interaction, can be answered as follows. The teachers who participated in the study corrected extensively (90% of all the erroneous utterances), using a range of different corrective feedback types. They seem to rely mainly on correction moves with metalinguistic feedback and elicitations in order to invite the pupils to correct themselves. This kind of corrective feedback, often
Katja Lochtman is currently post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Germanic Languages at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where she teaches German as a foreign language. Her research interests include foreign language acquisition and teaching, multilingualism and language teacher education. She has published in the following German journals: ‘Zeitschrift für angewandte Linguistik’ and ‘Deutsch als Fremdsprache’.
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2019, SystemCitation Excerpt :This, as argued by Yoshida (2008), relates partly to the implicit and least-obtrusive nature of recasts, which enables teachers to avoid interrupting instruction and discouraging learners when giving CF, as was highlighted in the questionnaire data. However, it should be noted that prompts occurred very little in the data, which contravenes the findings from some previous studies (Lochtman, 2002; Lyster & Ranta, 1997). A reason for this may be attributable to Chinese teachers' entrenched belief in their role, which leads them to evaluate the students' performance by giving feedback instead of eliciting learners’ self-correction through prompts.
The relationship between adult EFL teachers' oral feedback practices and their beliefs
2014, SystemCitation Excerpt :However, Lyster et al. (2013) point out that this is not necessarily the case everywhere, as five of the twelve studies in their review did not identify recasts as the most frequent type. In the high school foreign language classrooms observed by Yang (2009) and Lochtman (2002), for instance, prompts were considerably more frequent than recasts. The adult EFL teachers in our Spanish context, on the other hand, showed a preference for recasts and in general did not use many prompts.
High school EFL teachers' oral corrective feedback beliefs and practices, and the effects of lesson focus
2023, IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
Katja Lochtman is currently post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Germanic Languages at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where she teaches German as a foreign language. Her research interests include foreign language acquisition and teaching, multilingualism and language teacher education. She has published in the following German journals: ‘Zeitschrift für angewandte Linguistik’ and ‘Deutsch als Fremdsprache’.