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.
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