Weekly Reflection (W8) by BoSun

This week we started with oral presentation for final project. On Tuesday, the presentation was ordered as follows: Hung-Tzu, Kevin, Yun-Deok and BoSun. On Thursday, Ping, Sorin, Yuki, Myong Hee presented their research proposals. The topics varied and here are the projects sorted by mode of feedback, i.e. oral feedback vs. written feedback.
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Research project addressing written feedback: Hung-Tzu, Kevin and Yuki

(1) Error correction in L2 writing: How successful are students in revising lexical errors? by Hung-Tzu
Her research will deals with written error correction and students revision of lexical errors with use of three different strategies (thesaurus, online dictionary and collocation dictionary). The rationale for her research is that it is necessary to examine lexical errors separately form grammar errors since written feedback literature revealed that the effectiveness of feedback types and learner’s ability to revise differ depending on the types of errors, i.e. lexical vs. grammar errors (Ferris &Robers, 2001; Gaskell &Cobb, 2004; Ferris, 2006).

The participants are 44 ESL students of UHM at two different levels (20 intermediate and 11 advanced learners) and they were taking academic reading courses with a focus on vocabulary learning. The procedure is as follows; 1) the participants completion of writing task followed by reading activities, 2) teacher’s provision of indirect feedbacks (underlining) for five lexical errors 3) student’s revision of their own writing using one of the three tools (thesaurus, online dictionary and collocation dictionary) 4) students’ reflection and evaluation of their writing and revision process. The data is 155 first drafts and 155 revised drafts including 775 lexical errors. The data will be analyzed by use of concordancer to examine distribution of the errors and learner’s repair depending on their strategy.

(2) Indirect error correction and improving grammar in L2 writing By Kevin
His research questions are 1) can indirect errors correction lead to improved performance on certain grammatical constructions on first drafts in an intermediate L2 writing class? 2) does indirect correction affect different grammatical constructions differently? His assumption is that indirect feedback involves depth of processing which encourages students correct their errors better.
The participants are 15 university-level ESL students aged 18-24 with various L1 background. At the time of data collection, they were enrolled intermediate writing class in the HPU focusing on grammatical accuracy. Three drafts were collected; teacher gave indirect feedback for first and second draft, students revised their first and second drafts and resubmit the drafts (1st draft-feedback-2nd draft-feedback-3rd draft). He reported that a rage of grammatical errors included verb form, verb test, incorrect articles, etc and the number of errors reduced by the third draft.

(3) Enculturation into academic discourse: focus on deficiency or agency by Yuki.
She is planning to conduct two studies focusing on the writers’ enculturation into academic English writing with two different data; one from university level- ESL writing classes in Hawaii and the other from her own writing. At the first project, she is addressing how contextual factors shape students into the academic discourse community. The participants are divided into two groups: 21 graduate students enrolled at advanced college academic ESL writing course and 22 undergrad freshmen taking freshmen composition course. The data will be analyzed for 1) types of feedback, 2) incorporation of feedback by types, 3) thematic analysis of students’ perception of their language, content, and rhetorical style development.

At the second project, she is carrying out longitudinal study of her own negotiation and enculturation process into disciplinary scholarly writing. For data analysis, she is employing autoethnography.
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Research projects about oral feedback: YunDoek, BoSun, Ping, Sorin and Myong Hee

(1) Which on can language learners rely on best, recasts or prompts, with relation to learner’s perception? By YunDoek
Her study addresses relative effectiveness of recasts vs. prompts on L2 learning in accordance with learner perception of the feedback in classroom settings on both short and long term basis. Her research questions is tackling following issues 1) the level of learner’s immediate uptake in response to recasts and prompts 2) the level of learner’s uptake for recasts and prompts on a long term basis 3) difference between immediate and delayed-post test performance for recast and prompts 4) similarities and differences between teachers’ and students’ preference for different feedback types across different linguistic items.
The participants will be students from HELP in UHM. The design will be both descriptive and experimental, adopting treatment and pre-post test. The participants are divided into control and treatment group, take the pre and post test, and go through treatment either recasts or prompts between pre- post tests.

(2) Reexamination of sub-categories of recasts and learner uptake by BoSun
She assumes that recasts constitute continuum with explicit and implicit end based on oral feedback literature (Sheen, 2007) and is tackling following issues 1) do 4 different types of recasts adopted from Lyster & Ranta (1998) enhance the acquisition of L2 grammatical structure 2) what characteristics of recasts lead to learner uptake and repair better? 3) Do 4 different types of recasts result in different effects depending on the learners’ proficiency?
The research will be descriptive study with two different levels (intermediate and advanced) of English classes (one from HELP and the other from ELI) in UHM. The data will be analyzed by use of coding scheme from Ryster and Ranta (1998) which sub-categorized recasts into 4 types: isolated declarative, isolated interrogative, incorporated declarative, and incorporated interrogative, depending on intonation (falling vs. rising) and existence of additional information (with or without additional information). The measure for acquisition is uptake, which is defined as learners’ immediate response followed by teachers’ recast (Lyster & Ranter, 1997). Uptake is again sub-divided into two categories: repair (correction) and needs repair (acknowledgement of errors).

(3) Implicit/ Explicit recasts, learner’s responses to recasts and linguistic development by Sorin.
She is examining 1) which types of recasts (implicit vs. explicit) leads to more learner uptake and subsequently more linguistic development of the target structure 2) whether primed production in response to recasts occur, if so, which types of priming leads to more frequent primed production.
The participants are KSL learners in Korea. Her research design is quasi-experimental wit pre-post-delayed posttest. The target structure hasn’t been finalized yet, and she is considering relative clause to be one of the good candidates. Coding scheme will follow the one from Lyster and Ranta (1998) and two out of the four types of recast will be chosen for implicit and explicit recast. The measurement will be uptake and primed production. Uptake will be operationalized as a student’s utterance immediately following the teacher’s feedback (Lyster & Ranta, 1997) and primed production is defined as learner’s new utterance using target structure form provided in the recast within six turns of recast, adopting McDonough & Mackey’s (2006) definition.

(4) Organization of error correction sequences in form-focused classroom by Ping
Her research questions are 1) what are the different types for corrective feedback in form-focused classroom? 2) does the classroom context influence students’ orientations to the corrective feedback? The participants are 14 students’ in Chinese 101 class (at beginner level) at UHM, The data were analyzed by use of CA. She has found that 1) teacher prompt and learner production was predominant sequence 2) other-initiated other repair showed high frequency whereas other-initiated self-repair and self-initiated other repair displayed low frequency. 3) self-initiated self-repair is rare.

(5) Investigation of small group interaction in a Korean university EFL classroom by Myong Hee
Her research is dealing with 1) types of collaborative learning and their distribution 2) the level of uptake for each category measured by repair and needs-repair. The participants are 24 students, enrolled at a college English reading course. The data is small group interactions (6 triads and 3 dyads) tape-recorded which lasted 12-18 minutes for each. Data analysis will adopt quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitative analysis focuses on distribution of various types of peer assistance and qualitative analysis will examine 1) co-construction 2) encouragement to topic continuation 3) self-correction with use CA analysis.