Evaluation of Loewen and Erlam (2006) by BoSun Choi

Loewen and Erlam (2006). Corrective Feedback in the Chatroom: An experimental study Shawn. Computer Assisted Language Learning , 19, 1-14

This quasi-experimental study tried to investigate the effectiveness of the two types of corrective feedback, i.e., recasts (implicit) vs. meta-linguistic information (implicit) on in online chatting with 31 beginning L2 learners of English. The target structure is regular past tense (verb+ed), which is known as a morpheme acquired later in morphemes studies (see Dulay and Burt, 1974). After taking pretest, the participants went through 56 minutes of corrective feed session (treatment), where they received either type of corrective feedback while completing the two tasks; story retelling after seeing a picture with written narratives and verbal description of the pictures. Their learning is measured by timed and untimed grammaticality judgment test (GJT) immediately and two weeks later. ANOVA analysis displayed insignificant difference for the two corrective feedback types and for time, meaning that the two groups there is no significant gains in response to either feedback type nor was there significant gain over time.

Reading this article is somewhat useful in a sense that it gives some insight into differences between face-to-face and online study. The suggestion of three features of online chatting is acceptable to explain insignificant amount of uptake as follows; 1) reduced immediacy of the feedback due to the overlap between interlocutor turns 2) the lack /reduced incidence of uptake in response to feedback. 3) students’ frequent going off the target and instructor’s less control over the off-topic. However, such suggestion is a bit mitigated when the author mentions that the participants’ low proficiency level may lead to insignificant amount of uptake. If the participants were not ready to learn the target form their proficiency level would serve as a conclusive factor. Even though the picture is puzzling, the characteristics of online chatting suggested in this study would give some ideas for further studies about corrective errors in online setting, which may be beneficial those who are interested in CALL and error correction.

I personally enjoyed reading it since the research gave me some insights about the characteristics of online feedback. It would be more enjoyable, however, if this study provided more sound explanation about the design. First, it did not explicitly explain why it adopted timed and untimed GJT for measurement different from the one in Ellis et al.’s(2006) study, by which this research is motivated for replication. Even though the design of this study is not new but directly employed from classroom research, this article may be enjoyable for this class in a sense that it describes some characteristics of online classroom setting, which greatly differs from off-line class. Especially, the instructor’s low level of control over student’s utterance seems to be interesting factor in response to its effect on learning since CALL literature pointed out that student centeredness is one of the important benefit of the online instruction.

I would like to recommend this article for the class since there has been scarce literature about the effect of online feedback in SLA literature. Despite of the result that there was no significant effect for either online corrective feedback, it is worth reading the description of the characteristics of online chatting. Given students’ growing need for application of technology to language classrooms, it would be worth further studying the effect of using different tool in language classroom.