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.