Corrective Feedback and Learner Repair:
An Observational Study of Elementary English Language Learners
Abstract
This paper presents an observational study of corrective feedback and student responses with English language learners at the elementary level. Transcription taken over the course of fifteen hours of English instruction using subject-matter lessons in small group, pull-out settings yielded seventeen error/feedback exchanges. Data include the frequency and distribution of six different types of corrective feedback and whether or not the learners responded with repair. The results reveal that the most common form of feedback does not result in any student repair, however, the feedback techniques that require students to actively engage in thinking about their language knowledge lead to high rates of student-generated repair.
Keywords: English language learners (ELLs), L2 corrective feedback, error correction, recast, student-generated repair Introduction
As a mother of a preschooler, I find myself constantly correcting my son when he mispronounces a word or makes mistakes with his use of English grammar. I often repeat what he says using the proper language and he seemingly ignores my corrections. I realize that he is simply not developmentally ready to internalize all of the complexities of the language but I continue to provide corrections, sometimes out of irritation but mostly just to model the correct usage. When I began observing English Language Learners (ELLs) in the classroom, I noticed that they were making many of the same mistakes my son was making. While they were all older than my son and attending to a second language as opposed to a first, they were likely progressing through the same stages of interlanguage, the systematic yet dynamic intermediate stage of language knowledge (Lightbown & Spada, 2006). Should my response as a teacher differ from my response as a mother when faced with language mistakes? I wondered if…