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.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
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.
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.
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