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.