Thursday, September 27, 2007

Weekly reflection (Week 6) by Sang-Ki

We covered four studies this week: Oliver (1995), Lyster & Ranta (1997), Ortega & Long (1997), and Doughty & Varela (1998).

The comparability is always a thorny issue, but we could still be better informed about the role of feedback by trying to compare each study’s design and main findings from a single line. The following summary would be insightful from that sense:

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Oliver (1995)

Laboratory study

Descriptive study (No particular focused targets; No casual explanation)

* Ss: 8-13-year-old ESL learners (16 dyads)

* Two feedback types in focus: Negotiation vs. recasts

* Main findings: Negative feedback was given to 61% of the students’ entire error moves (that is, 39% of error moves were ignored). Negotiation tended to be used when the meaning is opaque to NS interlocutors, whereas recasts were common when the meaning was transparent but the form was problematic. “Negotiation seems to serve to make the picture clear, whereas recasts are like straightening the picture on the wall” (p. 473). NS responses tended to be affected by several factors such as the type and complexity of learner errors. Learners seemed to successfully incorporate negative feedback (35% of recasts were incorporated).

Lyster & Ranta (1997)

Classroom study

Descriptive study (No particular focused targets; No casual explanation)

* Ss: 10-year-old content-based French immersion learners

* 20 hrs classroom observation, 4 classrooms, 4 teachers

* 6 types of feedback and subsequent uptake moves (4 types of repair & 6 types of needs-repair) were in focus

* Main findings: Recasts were used most often (55% of error turns induced teacher recasts). 69% of recasts were unnoticed, only resulting in topic continuation. Of the rest 31% of recasts which led to student turns with uptake, 18% and 13% resulted in repair and needs-repair turns, respectively. Compared to recasts (which only led to simple repetition of previous feedback turns), elicitation and metalinguistic feedback were more effective in that they might cause student-generated repair. More important is the observation that elicitation and metalinguistic feedback did not interfere with the flow of communication.

Ortega & Long (1997)

Laboratory study

Quasi-experimental study (Particular focused targets)

* Other related studies: Long et al. (1998), Inagaki & Long (1998)

* Ss: 3rd semester Spanish (low-intermediate level adult learners) (30 dyads)

* Two feedback types in focus: Recasts (negative feedback) vs. models (positive feedback)

* Targets: Object topicalization & Adverb placement (Both were previously unknown structures)

* Pre-posttest control group design

* Main findings: Both types of feedback did not bring about significant learning of object topicalization. Recasts were more effective than models in learning of the adverb placement rule.

Doughty & Varela (1998)

Classroom study

Quasi-experimental study (Particular focused targets)

* Ss: 11-14-year-old content-based ESL learners

* Targets: past tense –ed & conditional would

* One feedback type in focus: Corrective recasts

* Pre-post-delayed posttest control group design

* Main findings: The focused recasts led to substantial gains on oral mode tests and the beneficial effects were maintained 2 months later. Gains on written mode tests were less robust. FonF is feasible, but should be brief, immediate, focused, and not to be overused.

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After outlining the contrasting features of the four studies, we focused more on Ortega and Long’s (1997) quasi-experimental laboratory type study. We could be aware of the detailed experiment procedures by listening to actual task samples. (It was of particular interest to see that the GJT used by the researchers was not a conventional, decontextualized one).

In light of the study findings, even though the two targets were presumed to be at the same developmental stages, only the adverb placement rule was learned when recasts were provided to Spanish learners. Object topicalization rule might have been too difficult to observe the expected learning outcomes. By contrast, the adverb placement rule, which is more related to lexical items, could have been more learnable. What was interesting from the follow-up interview data was the fact that some learners, although they could not reply to the question as to what they actually had learned overall, tended to state the adverb placement rule accurately, indicating noticing of the rule truly occurred during the task performance.

An improvement of the study design could have been made with delayed posttest measures included. Also, rather than the repeated measures design, a combinatorial design with two feedback types and two target structures would have enabled us to have a clearer understanding of the roles of the two feedback types.

On Thursday, we focused on two of the four studies. Oliver (1995) and Lyster & Ranter (1997) that we covered are all descriptive recast studies. In pairs, we tried to find answers to the following five questions. I am including the answers and ideas we shared as a whole-class discussion format:

1) How frequent was negative feedback in each study?
* Oliver (1995; hereafter O): 38.82%
* Lyster & Ranta (1997; hereafter LR): 62%
* Different task conditions as well as idiosyncratic participant characteristics of the two studies may have resulted in this huge difference in the amount of feedback. For example, in the case of Oliver (1995), it was kids who gave feedback to their peers and the study was laboratory-based, which might have affected the reported smaller amount of negative feedback.
* LR: There seems a difference across teachers in the amount of negative feedback.
* O: Providing raw frequency data (instead of percentage values) would have been more desirable.

2) How was negative feedback provided (how many different ways, what range of explicitness) in each study?
* O: 2 types; negotiation and recasts
* LR: 6 types; recasts, elicitation, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, explicit correction, repetition; these 6 types of feedback may exist on the implicit-explicit continuum.
* It came to be acknowledged that recasts may take an explicit form.

3) What evidence does each of the two studies consider in order to talk about "effectiveness” of negative feedback? (Do they talk about “effectiveness,” and if so what arguments do they consider?)
* LR: Effectiveness is discussed in terms of the extent of uptake and repair. Particularly, student-generated repair, which is different from uptake and simple repair, is important in telling the effectiveness of negative feedback.
* O: Feedback is available and usable. Negative feedback seems effective from the point that learners tended to incorporate NS’s feedback in subsequent turns (e.g., 35% of recasts were incorporated).

4) How did participants respond to negative feedback in each study? (what did they do with it, if anything?) -- Skipped

5) What did each study have to say about type of error?
* O: Detailed categories of grammatical errors were identified. Recasts were significantly more common than negotiations for errors in singularity, plurality, and subject-verb agreement. For other cases (e.g., Aux/copula, pronoun, word order/omission, word choice, no subject), negotiations were the preferred feedback option.
* LR: Grammatical errors (50%) are the most common error type, followed by lexical (18%), phonological (16%), and L1-related errors (16%). Lexical and phonological errors (80% and 70%) induced teacher feedback more than grammatical and L1-related errors (56% and 43%). This reminded us the findings from Mackey et al.’s (2000) study, suggesting the saliency and correctability issue in relation to each type of error. Recasts were the more preferred option across different error types, whereas negotiation of form was more common than recasts for lexical-related errors.


Sunday, September 16, 2007

Refletion on Thursday, September, 13th by Yun Deok Choi.

Fortunately, this reflection will be very short one, compared to the last one ;).
On Thursday, we met in a computer lab, 155b at 10:30.
Sang-Ki, David and Bo-sun led the whole lab session, helping us to create a new page where we could upload our own bibliography for research paper and make a link between the page and the home.

First, we made a list of each classmate’s intriguing research topic on a main page as the following:
References
Indirect error correction and its effect on grammar in L2 writing
Peer feedback (Oral)
Relative effectiveness of prompts versus recasts in classroom
Repair in CA
Error feedback in L2 writing: Focusing on vocabulary
Learnability in SLA and overpassivization errors
How different interactional feedback lead to L2 development
Role of noticing in interactional feedback
Implicit error correction and CALL
Relationship between recast and learner's response
Reponses to different types of recasts and L2 development

Then, each classmate created his/her own page with the title that indicates the topic of their references and made links to the home.

In a new page, each person wrote a sentence like “This list of references initially posted by…” as Dr. Ortega suggested. Then, we uploaded our bibliographies. At that time, we encountered one technical problem. That is, several of us brought the bibliographies in a word file by using removable disks. When we copied the bibliographies and pasted them, the word formats were destroyed and we had to rework on it. Some of our classmates kept asking “What did you do?” as they encountered unexpected outcome. It’s because some classmates said that when two or more people work on the site together, that kind of accidents might occur. As a result, the format of each classmate’s bibliography is not uniform. Maybe we should work on it more. That’s all we actually did.
Thank you for your help, Sang-ki, David and Bosun.

Reflection on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 by Yun Deok Choi

Truscott, J. (1999). What’s wrong with oral grammar correction. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 55, 437-456.
Lyster, R., Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (1999) A response to Truscott’s ‘What’s wrong with oral grammar correction.’ The Canadian Modern Language Review, 55, 457-467.

At the beginning of the class, we started the lesson by appointing each classmate to a certain week when he/she would make a reflection on classroom activities. After deciding that, we moved on to talking about Truscott who is the author of the article “What’s wrong with oral grammar correction.” At first, Dr. Ortega asked Hung-Tzu about his background or career since she had taken his English class in Taiwan. According to Dr. Ortega and Hung-Tzu, John Truscott is originally from USA and has stayed in Taiwan for over ten years. Recently he has interested in cognitive perspective like working memory and wrote an article on meta-analysis on L2 writing which will be published within this year. In addition, he published a couple of articles with Michael Sharwood Smith on interlanguage development. He also wrote some articles on error correction against L2 writing and noticing, aside from the present article.

Before group discussion of the two articles, Dr. Ortega pointed out that Truschott takes the theoretical position of Krashen and Universal Grammar toward SLA in the article, with some explanations on Krashen and his academic point of view in SLA.

For about 10 minutes we exchanged our impressions and thoughts about Truscott (1999)’s article and the responding article by Lyster, Lightbown, and Spada (1999) in small groups, with the goal of formulating meaningful research questions based on the two articles. During whole class discussion, several students presented their own positions whether they agreed with Truscott or Lyster et al. At first, Kevin said that he could not completely agree with either article. Sorin agreed with Truscott’s assertion to some extent from a teacher’s perspective, but she was cautious of his extreme all-or-nothing position against error correction. Besides, Yun Deok agreed with Truscott’s concern about affective aspects in terms of excessive error correction. On the other hand, Myunghi stated that she is in favor of error correction by mentioning her Japanese class in which the teacher always provided correction and she had learned a lot.

Dr. Ortega indicated “Affective” versus “Effective” issues with regard to the article and she stated that Truscott claimed that error correction is not effective and harmful for learners to learn a language. In terms of effectiveness of error correction, Dan mentioned feasibility of research on error correction. Then, Yuki touched upon how we should think about error correction with relation to educational purposes and contextual factors, especially in terms of critical pedagogy.

We criticized Truscott’s confusing and contradictory assertion that he confined error correction to grammar by saying that “a similar case could be made for other types of errors (e.g., in pragmatics or pronunciation” and at the end he suddenly changed his remarks into “the issues involved in correction of errors in pragmatics or pronunciation, for example, differ in some respect in some respects from those I have considered here, so my conclusion should not be casually extended to those areas.” As for his antipodal position, David mentioned that it might have something to do with the process of editing the article. ;)

With respect to his contradictory position, Kevin pointed out the term,“Consistency.” To be more specific, Kevin was wondering if teachers provide consistent correction, is correction effective? Ping also criticized Truscott’s assertion that error correction which is appropriate for one student might not proper for other students by mentioning that individual learner variables. Dr. Ortega also expressed sharp criticism of his unreasonably continuous assertions and brief mention of relative studies for his own sake. She also put her finger on that what Truscott called negotiation of form refers to both explicit error correction and explanation as Sang-ki referred to implicitness and explicitness of error correction with respect to Truscott’s point of view.

With respect to the studies that Truscott mentioned in the article, Dr. Ortega explained Robert’s study which is included in a book (1995) edited by Dick Schmidt. His study is about 5 learners of Japanese L2 and he video taped while a teacher delivered a lecture. Then he asked the learners about what kind of errors they made and what they knew about the errors when a teacher corrected their errors while they were watching the one-hour video tape. The findings of the study are students could not figure out any error correction and what the error correction was about. According to the teacher, it is very earlier study which investigated whether students noticed error correction and understood it. Mackey, Gass & McDonough (2000)’s article in SSLA and Carpenter, MacGregor, & Mackey (2006)’s article in SSLA are very similar to the study in terms of their topic and research method. From this perspective, Dr. Ortega posed a question: Do students have to notice error correction and understand the nature of the correction in order to benefit from it? In order to answer the question, she cited Dick Schmidt’s remark: noticing is necessary but understanding is not necessary.

In this vein, she mentioned “emergentism” and I consulted Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics (2002) in order to find the exact definition of the term. I hope this will help you to understand what it means. According to the dictionary, “emergentism” refers to the view that higher forms of cognition emerge from the interaction between simpler forms of cognition and the architecture of the human brain. For example, in language acquisition, it has been proposed that categories such as the parts of speech are not innate but emerge as a result of the processing of input by the perceptual systems (cited from Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p177). This point of view leads to studies like McDonough (2006)’s interaction and syntactic priming.

We also talked about Dekeyser (1993)’s study which was mentioned by Truscott. Dekeyser picked up several classes and compared them for whole semester or a year. Dr. Ortega stated that it is a very pioneering study because it first examined error correction in conjunction with motivation.

After explaining above mentioned articles, she also tried to think about whether error correction
should be done across all aspects of language or it should be done on one specific area at a time
from the perspectives of teachers?
We dealt with this question in terms of the following aspects:
-simple vs. complex
-core vs. peripheral
-ready vs. unready

Besides, she also posed the following question: Should we correct any errors whenever they
occur? Or should we make a plan for providing correction for specific aspect of language in
advance? And she stated that it depends on which position we are taking. If we are believers of
“incidental, reactive, on the fly” types of correction, we provide more immediate correction. On
the other hand, if we are believers of “metalinguistic process(understanding),” we provide
delayed correction.

She also explained that, in terms of corrections on written or oral production, writing studies
like Studies like Ferris (1999, 2002, 2004) and Hyland (2006), error correction was provided in
response to more general, overall aspects of language, except for Sheen(2006)’s study. On the
contrary, oral studies like Doughty and Varela (1998), error correction was provided in response
to a specific language structure.

As for the question: How to select errors to be corrected?
In order to answer the question she cited Mike Long’s suggestion. He suggested that we should
consider the following factors:
-useful
-remediable
-pervasive
From this perspective, she also advised us that we should make a decision whether we would deal with overall error correction or concrete error correction when we design our own research.
She also added that if we would concentrate on a certain area, we should gather information what we know about that area. For example, if we want to investigate English morpheme, we should know that learners acquire past tense “-ed” first and then they acquire third person singular pronoun.

At last, Dr. Ortega refuted Truscott’s criticism on Doughty and Varela (1998)’s coding scheme. He critiqued their study did not consider learners’ overuse of target forms; however, as we carefully analyzed their coding scheme together, we found that overuse clearly was embedded in the scheme. Dr. Ortega praised the scheme for its interlanguage sensitive quality and their task essential properties, which means the task provides a lot of obligatory contexts where learners should use target forms. In addition, she advised us that we should have knowledge on a selected form and also come up with this kind of well-designed, feasible coding system when we do our own research and we should concentrate on a couple of target forms rather than a single target.

As for suggestions for Wiki, she advised us to write a couple of definitions of error correction
from today’s articles on the web. And feel free to use it as our own notebooks.
On Thursday, we should go to computer lab and work on Wiki project since Dr. Ortega will go to Japan in order to attend a conference. Plus, we should also upload bibliography on Wiki by Thursday. We will not have any classes for next week due to TBLT conference.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Commentary Tues, September 4th, 2007 (Y. Watanabe)

We started off by talking about the importance of footnote chasing while reading the articles. Footnote chasing is a research strategy to locate key resources on a topic by searching the reference sections of a paper. It will be easier to retrieve relevant literature for your own study, if you flag footnote chased articles and make notes. From my experience conducting meta-analysis, I would also recommend making notes and keywords in the Endnote software. Accumulation of those notes and keywords in the Endnote makes graduate students’ life much easier when it comes to writing a literature review. So far, each classmate has reviewed two articles. Among the reviewed articles, we were cautioned not to cite Frank Morris’s work.

For the rest of the class, we were engaged in mini error correction task. We first listed types of teacher written feedback on students’ writing and the types of error analysis in research. The following categories were identified.

Teacher

Types of feedback:

  1. direct feedback (making correction with/without explanation)
  2. indirect feedback (marking the location and/or type/nature of the error, clarification request)
  3. metalinguistic feedback (explanation of the error)

Modes and manner of feedback:

  1. conferencing, peer response
  2. paper vs. electronic

Researcher

- Overall accuracy (nature of the error, all error noteworthy of focus)

- Specific error:

  • article
  • verb morphology (tense, aspect, subject agreement)
  • preposition


The class was divided into six groups taking the role either as a teacher (direct FB and indirect FB group) or as a researcher (overall accuracy, article error, verb morphology error, and preposition error group) to analyze the error of a students’ writing sample. In a group, we identified errors and discussed the difficulty of providing or analyzing the errors.
Summarized below are the key takeaways from the discussion:

Teacher difficulty from direct group:
  1. It’s difficult as a teacher to provide feedback without knowing what stage of draft the writing is, the learning objectives, and learners’ proficiency and background.
  2. Form vs. content
    - Making a distinction between lexical and grammar error.

    - Distinguishing local versus global error.
  3. Different teachers focused on different errors (very erratic).

Teacher difficulty from indirect group:

  1. Knowledge about the content of the writing (e.g., history in our writing sample) may be needed to accurately identify verb tense errors (e.g., past perfect). Especially personal narratives will be difficult to correct. Making corrections may change the content. Sometimes we need to ask clarification questions instead of direct correction.
  2. Uniformity of coding. People use different coding system.

Researcher difficulties

  1. Where does the error begin and end?
  2. How can you clearly classify errors? (difficulty of form versus content)
  3. It’s difficult to determine what the nature of the error is. What do you do with idiomatic errors that are grammatically correct?
  4. It will be hard to determine the overall accuracy for intermediate level students’ writing. As the learners’ sentences become more complex, the more difficult to define what the nature of the error is.

Through the mini-error correction task, I learned how difficult and time consuming it is as a teacher or as a researcher to truly understand the linguistic (local) error of students’ writing. I am curious about the decision making process of teachers and researchers’ error identification and classification.

For next Tuesday:

Read Truscott (1999) and Lyster et al.’s (1999) commentary.

Reminder for next Tuesday:

“Verb morphology error group” needs to give a short summary on the tense errors (past perfect).

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Commentary on Sep. 6

Thursday: meet at PC lab and work on wiki

We first googled "second language acquisition" and logged on to the wikipedia's SLA page.

David: Please take a look at how it is structured. Browse the wikipedia page. See what's included/missing/all the info out there.
Sangki: I'm going to show you how to edit infomation and use page history.

That went on for a few minutes as Sangi explained how it worked.

Next, we went to SLS 750 wiki homepage. there was nothing...we had to do SOMETHING with it.

Sangki taught us how to make a new page, create a link, make an external link, and then link everything together. After the lesson, we gave it a try and played with it for 10 minutes.

Then, we started creating the first page for our wiki. Brainstorming for table of contents took quite a while. Here's the list we came up with:

1. Definition of error feedback
2. Types of error feedback
oral vs. written
teacher vs. learner-initiated
implicit vs. explicit
feedback on form vs. content
feedback on oral vs. written language
offline vs. online
intensive vs. extensive
reactive vs. preactive
group ve. individualized
(David was busy typing everything in.)
It's when we were about to make the third one that we started having trouble with bullets, numbers, all that stuff. We decided to clean it up at another time.

We went back to the first one on the list: definition of error feedback, trying to create a page for it. Here's what we wrote:

Error feedback is a reaction to students' interlanguage performance.

Then, Sangki suggested everyone edit the page, add their own information to it, and make new pages, just to see what happened when people were editing it simultaneously. That kept us busy for 5 minutes. Sangki walked around and asked us NOT to change the main page.

Final goal of the day: create a new page, make a link, and save it.
Thank Sangki and David for go over the basics with us.
Now you can check out our wiki website and add your comments!

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Yongyan & Flowerdew (2007): Reviewed by Y. Watanabe

Yongyan, L., & Flowerdew, J. (2007). Shaping Chinese
novice scientists' manuscripts for publication. Journal of Second
Language Writing, 16, 100-117.

Error correction in writing does not just happen in language classrooms but also outside the language classroom, for example, when attempting to publish research article in international journals. According to Li (2005, as cited in Yongyan & Flowerdew, 2007), many Chinese doctoral students in science programs are under pressure to publish papers in journals indexed by Science Citation Index, which are international journals predominantly published in English.

When publishing a research article, various stakeholders interact in shaping the manuscript, thus the written product in the journal is often considered as co-constructed artifact. Yongyan and Flowerdew (2007) uncover the roles of the supervisors, peers, and language professionals in 12 Chinese (English as additional language) doctoral science students’ experience submitting and publishing research articles in English. Interviews, emails, and weblogs were utilized to collect doctoral students’ perceptions of feedback from their supervisors, peers, and language professionals, as well as the supervisors’ view on the type of feedback they provide. The researchers found that although doctoral students prefer native English speakers’ feedback, due to economical and accessibility reasons, local experienced English as additional language scientists are the predominant shapers of doctoral students’ manuscripts. The study suggests that there is a need for partnership between English as academic purpose professionals and Chinese-native scientists who have experience publishing in international journals, in order to facilitate the local scholarly community.

I chose this article since my colleagues and I recently submitted manuscripts to international journals, and was curious how other junior scholars perceive, incorporate, and/or reject feedback from peers and other senior scholars. Since submitting a manuscript to a journal is a high-stake task, I am particularly interested in how junior scholars negotiate their writing with the local reviewers (supervisors, peers, etc.) and the gate keepers of the journal (the editors and the manuscript reviewers) and how they gradually acculturate into the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) of their discipline.

To my view, Yongyan and Flowerdew did not fully summarize and present the data in a convincing manner. Their interview questions in the Appendix had much more than what they have summarized and concluded. For this reason, I would not recommend this article to review in class, but there are few studies they have mentioned in their study that include more in-depth data. By quickly reviewing the reference list and reviewing the abstract of the cited articles, the following articles may be of interest to some of you who are looking at how novice writers gain access to (and enter) academic disciplinary literacy practices.

Li, Y. –Y (2007). Apprentice scholarly writing in a community of practice: An “intraview” of an NNES graduate student writing a research article. TESOL Quarterly, 41, 55-79.

Li, Y. –Y (2006). Netotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15, 159-178.

Heift, feedback in CALL, and 'uptake'

Heift, T. (2004). Corrective feedback and learner uptake in CALL. ReCALL, 16, 416-431.

Being that this study was conducted several years ago, it's aim at the time was to help fill the gap in (the dearth of) research on corrective feedback and CALL (computer-assisted language learning). Participants (177 beginning, high-beginning, and intermediate students of German at three Canadian universities) engaged in online grammar activities that supplemented their regular class sessions over the duration of one semester. The online exercises involved three types of feedback: metalinguistic, metalinguistic + highlighting (of the error), and repetition + highlighting. (This last category is a little vague, since 'repetition' is actually a broad category prompt, such as "grammar", which helps students identify the type of error they committed.)

The goal of the study is to discover which type of feedback leads to higher instances of uptake, here defined as any attempt by a student to correct his or her mistake. (Note that students always had the option to skip ahead to the next exercise without making any correction whatsoever.) Results show that the metalinguistic + highlighting is "most effective at eliciting learner uptake", though not in a statistically significant way. Additionally, the two learner variables of student gender and language proficiency did not have a significant effect on the results.

OK, now that that's out of the way. This was an interesting study to read, personally, as I'm also fiddling around in this very same area. The organization of the article was clear and the statistics and charts all very comprehendable. What raises my hackles, though, is the central question this article is asking. While there is value in showing that students prefer or attend to one type of feedback over another (and only three types of feedback were studied here), in the end I wind up asking myself, "So what?" — especially when the definition of "uptake" means merely attempting to correct a mistake when the computer is telling you, 'Hey, you made mistake.'

Personally, I wanted to see what kind of long-term uptake occurred, but that was not of immediate interest to the researcher. I also kept asking myself what the value of being told 'you made a mistake with the past participle' is when students aren't asked to do anything further with that mistake other than type in something else and have the computer check the answer. Sure, it beats what is possible in a workbook, but I'm skeptical of how much real uptake is happening here. I would have much preferred to see how this kind of explicit feedback stacks up against an implicit variety where students have to judge whether the meaning of what they've said/written is interpreted by a 'listener' as what they meant to say. Hey, wait a minute: that sounds an awful lot like what I've been tinkering with myself... I just have little faith that rewriting a word because you've been told the form is wrong leads to anything substantial in the way of SLA. I may be wrong.

Should we read this for class? Probably not. It was good for me and what I'm studying, but it doesn't have a lot of class-wide appeal, I'm guessing.

Evaluation of Todd (2001) by BoSun

Todd, R. (2001). Induction from self-selected concordances and self-correction. System, 29, 91-102

This research investigates whether university-level L2 learners of English are able to induce patterns of target words using concordance and self-correct their errors in writing based on their induction. The two key terms, induction and self-correction are defined as the ability to generate rules or patterns based on the examples including target words (induction) and learners’ ability to apply induced patters in self-correction (self-correction). The research question is whether the learners can induce rules using concordance and use the rule induced to self-correction their errors in writing. Procedures are as follows; after lexical items causing errors in writing were identified, the students self-created 23 concordances of the lexical items, induced patterns from the data and are asked to apply the rules in self-correction of their errors. The participants were generally able to induce valid patterns from their own concordance and make valid self-correction. There was a strong correlation between induction and self-correction, meaning that induction and self-correction are likely to occur together. It is also revealed that induction and self-correction are possibly affected by several factors such as the part of speech of the lexical items, effects of number of parts of speech, the number of patterns of usage, the number of meanings.

It is somewhat useful to read this article since it gives couple of ideas for further study. First, it is necessary to do further study whether induction leads to self-correction. This study found a strong correlation between induction and self-correction; however, a strong correlation between the two abilities does not necessarily mean induction of rules causes self-correction. Second, it would be another research topic for further study to investigate the effects of several factors (e.g. the part of speech of the lexical items) that has significant correlation with inducement and self-correction in this study. Again, this article reported a correlation between the factors and inducement and self-correction, therefore whether such factors actually affect inducement and self-correction needs to be investigated in future study. Last, it would worth examining which of these factors has greater effect than the other on induction and self-correction.

I personally enjoyed reading this article very much. The concepts of induction and self-correction are very attractive since these abilities enable L2 learners to be autonomous. These concepts are also interesting in a sense that it sheds light on how incorporation of technology leads to learner autonomy. However, I was a bit confused when the author mentioned inducement as a prerequisite for self-correction and the factors affecting inducement and self-correction since it seems that he misinterpreted correlation as cause and effect.

My conclusion is that I do recommend this article to be added to the reading packet. Above all, studies about concordance seem to be rare in the literature, and it would add a new perspective for self-feedback and computer mediated feedback with further studies, e.g. inducement as a process of self-feedback.

Evaluation of McDonough (2006) by Sorin

McDonough, K. (2006). Interaction and syntactic priming. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 179-207.

Syntactic priming, which has been vigorously investigated in 1st language acquisition and psycholinguistics research, is a “phenomenon that is characterized by a speaker’s repeated production of a previously spoken or heard structure across successive utterances” (p. 181). This study, as the first research to adopt syntactic priming in second language interaction research, explores whether syntactic priming plays a role in L2 development through interaction. Two research questions were posed: (1) Does syntactic priming occur during interaction between L2 English speakers?; and (2) Do English L2 speakers show increased use of the target structure following exposure to syntactic priming? English dative construction, which has two interchangeable forms (prepositional datives-PD, and double-object datives-DOD) was the target structure of this study, and two experiments were conducted with advanced English learners. The first experiment showed that syntactic priming occurred only with PD even though the participants were exposed to both PD and DOD priming, and the number of PD production increased over time (through baseline, priming, and post-priming). The second experiment, which then investigated DOD construction only, again failed to show the evidence of syntactic priming, indicating that most of the participants might not have been ready for the DOD construction as shown in the ad-hoc analysis. In the ad-hoc analysis of production data, those participants who produced DOD construction in the baseline data, showed increased production of DOD in priming session. The current study did not directly investigate the issue of error correction (only positive evidence provided in the form of syntactic priming by the interlocutor was examined in this study), however, it showed the potential role of syntactic priming in error correction research by demonstrating L2 learner’s more frequent production of target forms due to syntactic priming.

Here are some implications of this study. First and foremost, this study showed that syntactic priming did occur in L2 interaction, and L2 learners produced target structure more as a result of syntactic priming provided by the interlocutor. Since syntactic priming can occur across several turns, although this study was limited to learner’s subsequent production following syntactic priming, the findings can offer an invaluable insight to error correction research, particularly on the effectiveness of implicit error correction such as recasts, as shown in McDonough and Mackey (2006). Second, this research suggested that positive evidence provided through syntactic priming not only offered models but also triggered target language output leading to L2 learning. Third, the findings demonstrated the crucial role of development sequence on syntactic priming. In order to ensure the effect of syntactic priming on learner’s subsequent production and eventually acquisition, it seemed that learners should be at the right development sequence (in this study, learners produced more PD but not DOD, which is considered to be more difficult).

With regard to usefulness, comprehensive review of syntactic priming research (including definition and different types of syntactic priming, empirical studies conducted on syntactic priming-although most of them were on L1 acquisition and only a few on L2-, and the elicitation techniques used in those studies) will be very useful resources to those who are interested in this line of research. In addition, this research newly adopted confederate scripting technique, in which a participant carries out tasks with a confederate of the researcher instead of another participant. This technique allowed the researcher to control more carefully participants’ exposure to and production of target structure. Thus, those students who are seeking ways to hold more control over input and interaction of the participants, will find this technique useful.

Overall, the idea of adopting syntactic priming in L2 acquisition research was very interesting to me. Also I enjoyed following the logical development of research questions building on the findings of previously studies, as shown in the current study (from previous research to current study and from experiment 1 to experiment 2) as well as in her next study which was based on the current study (McDonough & Mackey, 2006). However, while development of arguments was logical and easy to follow, there were some details and terms that were not so clearly written and confusing; it made me stop and ponder what the researcher meant. Thus, this article may not be so easy to read for those who are not familiar with this line of research.

As for course reading, I do not want to recommend this article. It is not because this article is not worth reading, but because the follow-up article, McDonough & Mackey (2006), showed the role of syntactic priming in L2 interaction and development in a more comprehensive and convincing way, with relation to error correction (in their study, recasts), learner’s different responses (repetition and primed production), and L2 development. Thus, I would recommend including McDonough & Mackey’s article in our reading packet, and leave this article as “highly recommendable” for those who are interested in syntactic priming.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Nelson & Carson (2006) evaluation by Ping

Nelson, G. & J. Carson. (2006). Cultural issues in peer response: Revisiting ‘culture.’ In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (eds.), 42-59.

This article is quite easy to read. I was able to read it without constantly thinking of getting more coffee, so that's good. And it's short, too. I'm very grateful I picked this one :)

In the article, Nelson and Carson argue that culture could be a contextual factor in the effectiveness of peer response. In their study on peer group interactions, they found the three Chinese participants all expressed their reluctance to disagree with other peers' comments and their desire to maintain the harmony of the group. Their shared cultural expectations seem to explain why they didn't give negative feedback to their peers and why they held back their criticism. The students found it difficult to participate successfully in peer response interactions because giving negative feedback works against their cultural values. Therefore, the effectiveness of peer feedback is discounted. Nelson and Carson then hypothesize that cultural backgrounds may influence the dynamics of group interactions and further play a role in the effectiveness of peer feedback.

They also pointed out that the construct of “culture” is controversial. Using it as a contextual factor has been critiqued by postmodern, post-structuralist, and post-colonial theorists as reductionist, assuming culture to be static and coherent. The authors illustrate the debate on culture-stereotype connection at some length and, in the end, they take a stance by saying that there is “a systematic, culturally determined way in which all members in a certain culture think, behave, and act” (Nelson & Carson, 1994, p. 14). There are multiple causes of successful and unsuccessful peer feedback. By examining possible cultural effects in peer feedback, the study aims to highlight the complex variables in providing quality feedback.

Overall, I enjoy reading it. I'll recommend it to anyone who is interested in cross-cultural issues and contextual elements of peer feedback interactions. The article doesn't require any background knowledge. Even if you are not familiar with peer response, you will not have much trouble reading it.

However, my problem with the article is I still don't know how to tease apart the contextual factors the authors investigated. I mean, how much can we say that the effectiveness is culture-related? How much can we say we are not making stereotype connection when we talk about cultural homogeneity? These questions seem to linger in my mind.
Evaluation of Morris (2002) by Myong Hee

Morris, F. (2002). Negotiation moves and recasts in relation to error types and learner repair in the foreign language classroom. Foreign Language Annals, 35(4), 395-404.

This study investigates interaction of adult beginning learners of Spanish in the foreign language classroom. Forth-two students formed pairs and worked on the same jigsaw task. Their interaction was coded for types of error (syntactic/lexical), types of negative feedback (explicit/recasts/negotiation moves), and repair. Findings show that (1) they did not use explicit negative feedback; however, they provided implicit negative feedback (70% of errors received); (2) syntactic errors tended to invite recasts, whereas lexical errors tended to invite negotiation moves; (3) they tended to repair ill-formed utterance immediately, but the frequency of repaired errors followed feedback was low; and (4) all syntactic repairs and the majority of lexical repairs followed negotiation moves.

I found this article useful. The role of interaction has been central in SLA and accordingly pair and small group activities have been promoted in the L2 classroom. Along with a CLT approach, a small group activity has been highly encouraged in order to promote student-centered class and to improve fluency through practicing a target language. In the case of EFL context, a small group activity is the major source of learner interaction, along with teacher-learner interaction. As I promote a lot of group work in my classes, I have been curious to know whether it is beneficial to my students. This study reveals what is going on between NNS learners while interacting in dyads. It may be a good example to those who want to investigate a similar study in other FL classrooms.

I’d like to recommend this article to be added to our SLS 750. As I mentioned above, peer correction is another important feedback area to explore. I guess there are some (at least a few) who are planning to look into peer feedback in the FL/SL classroom. For those, this study may be a good reference.

Evaluation of Bitchener, Young, & Cameron (2005) by Hung-Tzu

Bitchener, J., Young, S., & Cameron, D. (2005). The effect of different types of corrective feedback on ESL student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 14, 191-205.

Bitchener, Young, and Cameron (2005) examined how different types of corrective feedback on linguistic errors determine accuracy performance in learner writing. 53 post-intermediate adult ESL learners were divided into three treatment groups: direct written feedback on the target features, direct written corrective feedback + 5 minute student-researcher conference, and no corrective feedback on the target features. In four different pieces of writing within 12 weeks, learners’ errors on the use of preposition, simple past tense, and definite articles were corrected. The study found that when the three targeted errors were considered as a single group, the type of feedback provided did not have a significant effect on accuracy, however, when linguistic categories were considered separately, the types of feedback had a significant effect on the accuracy performance. Learners who were in the written feedback + conference group outperformed the other two groups significantly in accuracy performance of simple past tense and definite articles, but not prepositions.

The researchers indicated that the difference of learner improvement on the three linguistic errors could be explained with the notions of “treatable” and “untreatable” errors proposed by Ferris (1999). Ferris distinguished “treatable” and “untreatable” errors, defining the former as rule-governed error (such as verb tense forms) and the letter as idiosyncratic error, which require learners’ acquired language knowledge to correct the error (such as word choice). Based on the results of Bitchener et al., more “treatable” errors (in this case, the use of simple past tense and definite articles) were amendable through explicit written feedback and one-to-one conferences in which rules were explained and clarified.

Rather than examining the accuracy performance with text revision on the same writing, Bitchener et al. specifically stated that this study attempted to investigate long-term improvement of linguistic features by using four new pieces of writing within 12 weeks. Since one of the most crucial factors contributing to the diverse results in written corrective feedback research lies in the difference on how researchers define effectiveness, Bitchener et al. were careful in formulating what they intend to measure. The results showed that there was significant variation in accuracy performance across the four pieces of writing and that learners’ progress did not show a linear and upward pattern, leading the researchers to suggest that in order to measure long-term effect of corrective feedback on writing, a period longer than a semester is needed.

I think the article is straightforward and therefore fairly easy to read. With a brief summery of the Truscott and Ferris debate as a start, the study offers a clear picture of the research and discussion involved in whether and how to give L2 learners feedback on their written grammatical error. For those who are familiar with the domain, this article could be a nice review, and for those who are more interested in oral corrective feedback, this could be an introduction to read without going much into details. My overall evaluation to the article is therefore “recommended”.

One article that seem particular interesting to me when reading this study was:

Ferris, D. R., & Roberts, B. (2001). Error feedback in L2 writing classes: How explicit does it need to be? Journal of Second Language Writing, 10, 161-184.

The distinction on “treatable” and “untreatable” errors was examined in this study. Since lexical errors were categorized as a more “untreatable” error, looking at how lexical errors were treated in this study will help me fine-tune my own research.

Evaluation of McDonough(2005)'s article by Yun Deok Choi

McDonough, K. (2005). Identifying the impact of negative feedback and learners' responses on ESL question development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 79-103.

The article has a purpose to pinpoint if both negative feedback and learners’ response to it, or modified output, can notably predict the development of ESL question formation, based on Pienemann & Johnston’s developmental sequence for that structure. As for research method, the researcher used both sixty university students in Thai who were all assessed at stage 4 and five native speaker interlocutors. At stage 4, pseudo-inversion and yes/no inversion occur. Sentences like “Where are they now?” and “*Could you gave me some suggestion?” can be exemplars for this stage. The researcher employed a pretest and post-test design and all participants were equally assigned into four groups during three treatment sessions: an “enhanced opportunity to modify” group in which the NSs responded to students’ inaccurate question forms through repetition with stress and rising intonation and then they offered open-ended clarification request like “what?” and stop for a moment for giving an opportunity to the students for modifying their previous erroneous utterance, an “opportunity to modify” group where the NSs responded to learners’ inaccurate question forms just by providing an open-ended clarification request, a “feedback without opportunity to modify” group in which the NSs highlighted students’ inaccurate question forms by repetition with stress and rising intonation but they did not give chances to the students for modifying their utterance and continued their conversation, and “no feedback” in which the NSs did not offer any kind of feedback in response to the students’ inaccurate expressions. During treatment sessions, while the students completed three sets of two communicative activities eliciting question forms, they also kept writing learning journals, which were used to identify whether the students paid attention to target forms. After the treatment, all students finished four oral production tests that consisted of a warming-up activity and two activities eliciting question forms.

As to analysis of treatment task data, the students in “enhanced opportunity to modify,” “opportunity to modify,” “feedback without opportunity to modify,” and “no feedback” groups got different amount of negative feedback in decreasing order although the difference was not significant. And also the students in both “enhanced opportunity to modify” and “opportunity to modify” groups produced modified output while the others didn’t; however, the difference was not significant, either. Interestingly, the learning journals revealed that only the students in “feedback without opportunity to modify” group did not attend to the target forms. In terms of data analysis on oral production tests, the students should produce two question forms at a higher stage, stage5, in order to be judged to be developed or advanced to a higher level. At stage 5, “wh question + auxiliary verb” forms appear, and we can take “why is the girl looking at the moon?” for an example. Based on the data analysis, the researcher discovered that only modified output related to a more advanced level could critically predict the development of ESL question formation. She also suggested that “clarification requests” played a role indirectly in development of the target structure by promoting students’ production of modified output.

I think this article is pretty useful and interesting since it examined whether implicit negative feedback, namely “clarification request,” and modified output had beneficial effects on English question formation, separately or in combination. The researcher also tried to control the students’ attention to the target structure by manipulating the salience of inaccurate utterance provided by the interlocutors with a couple of techniques such as repetition, stress and rising intonation. I got the impression that the study is very similar to that of Doughty and Varela (1998) in light of not only using highlighting techniques (repetition, stress and rising intonation) with negative feedback (“clarification request” versus “recast”) in order to draw students’ attention to the target language features (English question formation versus English past tense) but also offering a time for the students to respond right after the feedback from the interlocutor while the other independent variables are different. In addition, I also thought that the study is unique in terms of distinguishing “clarification request” from other types of prompts such as “elicitation,” “metalinguistic clues,” and “repetition” based on the degree of explicitness even though the researcher just mentioned that the reason that she chose “clarification requests” among other types of negative feedback because the earlier research proved that they provide learners with more chances to produce modified output, especially compared with “recasts.” However, I was wondering whether the researcher made use of “clarification requests” per se while I was reading the article since she also included other elements such as “repetition, which is one of the other types of prompts,” stress, and rising intonation to “clarification requests” like Doughty and Varela did in their study and this point has been criticized by other researchers. What would have happen if she had only used “clarification requests?” I think it’s a remaining question to solve in the future research.

Actually I hardly enjoyed reading this article, especially when I was reading the result section. It was because the researcher mentioned various statistical terms such as a Kruskal-Wallis test, a Mann-Whitney test, and logistic regression. Since I am a novice in Statistics, it was a bit difficult and frustrating to interpret the data. However, if someone who is good at various Statistical techniques, it would be very rewarding work to read the article.

I don’t strongly recommend that it should be added to our 750 reading packet since it’s similar to Doughty and Varela (1998)’s study and I assume that almost everybody in our class already read it. Besides, it dealt with various Statistical terminologies that maybe some of us don’t know at all. If it isn’t enjoyable for almost everybody for any reason, there’s no need to add it since there are a lot of more interesting articles that are easy to follow.

Sachs and Polio (2007) by Kevin

Learners' Uses of Two Types of Written Feedback on a L2 Writing
Revision Task SSLA, 29, 67-100

This study is an attempt to determine the effectiveness of two types of feedback in improving learners written grammatical accuracy. The two types are error correction; here defined as direct correction of student's mistakes with the correct forms provided by the teacher, and reformulation; here defined as maintaining the meaning but not necessarily the form by rewriting the student's incorrect sentences in a more native like way. Reformulations with think-aloud comments were also examined to study student's awareness of their reformulations and the effect that this has on the effectiveness of the reformulation. Because of possible problems with the error correction part of the first study, a second study was done with a larger n size was done to control for these effects. In both studies, error correction was shown to be more effective than both kinds of reformulations in improving students written grammar. In addition, reformulations + think aloud were shown to be of limited use in studying awareness and noticing due to the interfering effect and extra cognitive load that is required to verbally report on awareness.

On the bright side, this article mentions the idea of depth of processing, which is popular among vocabulary acquisition researchers and which we talked about on the second day of class. The researchers believe that this concept should be imported to error correction research in general, which I think may be a good idea. This article also discusses in some detail the idea of how noticing is related to acquisition through error feedback. Examining the role of noticing at the level of awareness (superficial linguistic level) and at the level of understanding (knowledge of linguistic rules and metacognitive linguistic knowledge) is a secondary goal of the research here.
Both depth of processing and a more nuanced notion of noticing are important ideas and this article may prod other researchers into taking a look at these areas. Unfortunately this study doesn't contribute much to the discussion.

In addition to the awkward title of this paper, there are several problems, which for the most part, the authors are aware of and state clearly, with the design of the experiment. While it is interesting that the authors bring up the idea of depth processing, they choose direct reformulations as a way to test their hypothesis. According to the authors, the following sentences are examples of a reformulation and error correction:

As he was jogging, his tammy was shaked ORIGINAL
As he was jogging, his tummy was shaking. REFORMULATION

As he was jogging his tammy(crossed out and rewritten) was shaked(crossed out as rewritten as shaking)

As is obvious, they are very nearly the same thing. The first reformulation would not require much depth of processing and most likely result in students just copying the answer.
At any rate, the results show that error correction is more effective, but the researchers admit that the design of the experiment encouraged students to simply memorize the correct feedback and that the error correction results were better simply because the format, and not the type of feedback was different. So at best, we have superficial, short term improvement of grammar points that may or may not be due to the type of feedback, which doesn't tell us much.
One interesting result of the experiment is that it reinforced the idea that students providing verbal feedback about their state of awareness during error correction interferes with the error correction and should therefore be controlled for.

This was not an especially thrilling read. If you are in love with quantitative statistical analysis (Here is a test, what is the exact definition of a Kruskal-Wallis Test?) then you might be interested in this one because the authors use every trick in the book to make up for the fact that their n size is too small and there is no normal distribution to work with. Otherwise, you will find yourself skipping down to the results and discussion.

I don't recommend this one, but it raises a few good questions.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Minutes from week 2

Tuesday 8/28/07


Lourdes: Has everyone joined the blog and posted a profile?

Class is divided into 4 groups (per the four divisions in the article) to discuss Hyland & Hyland (Feedback on second language students' writing).

Groups will look at:

  1. effectiveness

  2. context (recent realization; what does this mean for different research traditions?; how much 'context' can we account for in any particular study?)

  3. footnote chasing (is there any study that jumps out as recommendable for this class?)


Group presentations begin at 11:15; Lourdes asks that we only look at effectiveness for now (will address context and any suggested readings on Thursday).

Group 1: Teacher written feedback
  • Direct v. Indirect

  • Long-term effect v. short-term

  • Cultural factors

  • Metalinguistic / metacognitive awareness

    • Lourdes: how about in terms of proof of effectiveness? Can students explain what feedback means? Are they able to understand the teacher's comments and revise in a way that is good?

    • This is how we think about how effectiveness is defined. What answer we give will determine how we go about our studies.

    • Any dispute over findings goes back to how people define effectiveness in the first place...


  • Proficiency

  • Assessment (need more long-term studies)


Lourdes: what we should be discussing is, 'what evidence is gathered to demonstrate effectiveness?' Effectiveness is defined as the ability to revise.
In the short term, the student merely does something with feedback; when talking about long-term, the student performs subsequent writing that has nothing to do with the original work.

Group 2: Content & Form
  • research not conclusive

  • hard to claim direct causal relationship between teacher's feedback and students' revisions

  • varied context and social factors (non-contextual and non-social)

  • teacher's stance about content and form (content - form distinction?)

  • types of feedback (Ferris 1997) ex: praise, criticism, suggestion, etc.

Lourdes: low-level errors at local level, or a problem that goes beyond form? When you have to re-write whole ideas, that's content and not form.

Could also do a study on this: it would be easy to look at real feedback given by real teachers and classify them as form, content, or neither.

Go back to the article: In how many different ways did researchers find effectiveness?

Group 3: Peer / Self feedback
  • Indicator: product/skill
    • accuracy (problem: how much? when?)

    • fluency (problem: measurement)

    • organizational / linguistic complexity


  • Disposition
    • learner autonomy (problem: evidence)

    • low affective filter

    • value & belief

    • awareness of audience


  • Process
    • interaction

    • negotiation


  • Awareness of outcomes


Lourdes: in this area of peer feedback, it's easier to see how effectiveness has been defined.

Ex: 'after peer feedback, students became better readers and editors.' So, this is another way to define 'effectiveness'. But, it's different from the typical measure: 'students become more accurate...'

Some types of error correction may be effective, but maybe things are already there that are optimal and we don't want error correction to mess with that.

Group 4: computer-mediated feedback
  1. computer-mediated communication

    • asynchronous

      • dialogic role, scaffolding

      • builds metacognitive awareness through archiving

    • syncrhonous

      • students more focused on feedback

    • CMC v. face-to-face

    • corpora-based

      • proficiency: corpora helpful for beginners and to develop independent writers


Lourdes: Local and global changes are examples of defining effectiveness.

What is the quality of comments? Too local? Too global? Too confusing?

No study look at everything, buut some studies are vague in defining what 'effectiveness' is.

Keep in mind how effectiveness and context are defined in articles we're reading for Thursday.

Thursday 8/29/07


Lourdes: keep article postings down to earth, consider your audience. Can you summarize in plain language?

Don't forget to mention enjoyability: was the study so dense that you couldn't get through it?

(Lourdes proceeds to briefly touch on each article reviewed on the blog.)

Recasts against the world! Since Long, everyone seems to be taking up recasts and comparing them to something else.

Good idea for a study: seeing how concordancing works with student self-editing.

If you want to do a design/proposal for this class, at least pilot part of it.

McDonough & Mackey (2006) — HOT article: correction may have an effect that goes to the type, not just the token.

Ellis: type frequency may be more important than token frequency; this idea has a lot of support from the psycholinguistics literature in L1.

Lourdes tends to agree with Ellis: people who strongly disagree tend to be UG'ers, which Lourdes is not.

However, Lourdes doesn't care much for the HUGE role that Ellis ascribes to L1.

Brief mention of where Skehan and Robinson differ (with Robinson leaning towards emergentism).

This semester we need to look at socio-cultural theory, because studies that go this way are different.

In SLA textbooks, socio-cultural theory (Lantolf and Vygotsky)is now inclued as legitimate SLA.

*Be aware of the three [didn't catch what "three" Lourdes was talking about — David], and be aware of which one a study aligns itself with because it's important (to know where a study an author situates him/herself).

Class will meet in the faculty computer lab next Thursday as Lourdes will be having lunch with the new chancellor. We (students) will discuss how to make a wiki and what we want to do with it. Harvest ideas from our blog and add them to the wiki — even only as themes at this point. For ex: "We need a page on recasts..."

Remember that our bibliographies are on a topic. Grouping: recasts w/ children, recasts and... etc.

(class reorganizes into same groups as Tuesday to look at context with respect to Hyland and Hyland.)

Group presentations on context
Definition: a combination of factors releated to the institution and writing program as well as those that teachers and students bring to the interaction.

Some elements/factors of context that were mentioned include:
  • socio-political issues (teacher-student relationship)

  • available resources and class size

  • institutional attitudes towards L2 writers

  • exams, program philosophy

  • student factors
    • attitudes, needs, preferences, cultural differences, proficiency, developmental stage, level of engagement

  • teacher factors
    • approach, variation, commenting strategies, language and style in feedback, beliefs, profile

  • indicators of context
    • institutional: location, face-to-face, role for teacher, policy

    • learner: level

    • affective context: motivation

  • computer conferencing
    • student-centeredness

    • teacher acts a a facilitator

  • automated

  • corpus: websites that offer more specific words and contexts

  • classroom realities (students' backgrounds, needs, and preferences

  • social-cultural perspective on learning

  • ownership of writing

  • culture: homogeneity, heterogeneity

  • power relationship: group dynamics

  • society: what standards dictate good teaching?


Lourdes: indicators of context are easier to identify in the article than effectiveness.

Institutional, ownership, agency: if we talk about these factors, where is the social context?

Motivation, individual differences, style: what about these?

Some studies just define context as, "this is an EFL class," or, "the subjects are adults".

We'll be aware of how context is addressed in the studies we look at.

(Last 10 minutes of class used to discuss potential project ideas.)

Lourdes: study idea: what are teachers basing their decisions on? It's also important to look at times when correction doesn't happen, and why...

Sang-Ki: what is the difference between aquisition studies and feedback studies?

Yuki: error correction is acquisition.

Lourdes: quasi-synonomous terms:
  • error correction

  • (I didn't catch this one)

  • negative evidence

  • negative feedback

Within L2 studies of writing, there is a small group that model themselves after the oral mode; others try other things.

Next class: read second article and post your review/evaluation to the blog.
Thursday: go to lab and work on wiki.

Notes on Storch (2007) and pair work

Storch, N. (2007). Investigating the merits of pair work on a text editing task in ESL classes. Language Teaching Research, 11, 143–159.

While the merits of group-work in second language classrooms has already been established, this study aims to address the gap in research comparing small group with individual work. The three research questions of the study are as follows:

1) Do learners working in pairs complete an editing task more accurately than learners who complete the task individually?
2) What is the nature of the learners' talk when working in pairs on an editing task?
3) Do learners reach grammatically correct decisions when deliberating over grammar?

For the study, four intact, upper-intermediate ESL classes at an Australian university were employed. Class A completed an editing task in pairs while students in class B completed the task individually. To investigate whether students prefer working on grammar-based tasks in pairs, students in classes C and D were given the option to work individually or with a partner. The task itself called for editing an authentic piece of writing (done by an ESL student from a previous session) that was manipulated to contain 19 error items typical of students at this level.

The results show a slight increase in accuracy for students working in pairs (who, on average, took longer to complete the task and made more amendments to the text), but the difference is not statistically significant. While the difference in mean scores with regard to those students who had the option to work alone or with a partner is greater — accounted for, perhaps, by higher motivation — it, too, is not statistically significant. This may not seem like a strong sell to encourage more group work in the second language classroom, but the study also finds that weaker students in particular may be at a disadvantage when working alone, and that pair work seems to provide learners with the most opportunities to engage interactively with the language and initiate self-repair.

Compared to other studies I've read, this one was relatively straightforward and rather pleasant to read, actually. It was of particular interest as I promote a lot of group work in my own classes, and it was nice to be reminded of the real benefits to learners that derive from this type of activity — even if the study itself didn't turn up significant evidence in favor or group work on the whole. Again, this is only one study.

As for it's usefulness for this class, I would have to say that there isn't a great deal pertaining to error correction per se, and therefore give it a gentle 'thumbs down'. If you want more evidence of why pair work is effective for certain learners dealing with a certain task type, I'd say give it a look over; otherwise, I think you'll be satisfied with the summary of research results stated above.