Error Correction Seminar

Continuing on the ELF/World Englishes debate

2007-11-15T13:43:00.000-10:00

The two articles (Ellis, 2006, and Seildhofer, 2001) stimulated our discussion on the perspectives and issues on error correction in ELF and World Englishes framework. I think we each had a lot to say, and I would like to hear more from you! Let's continue the discussion in this forum :)

2007-11-09T17:32:00.000-10:00

Weekly Reflection (W12) by Myong Hee

On Thursday (L2 writing & error correction)
Covered Bitchener, Young, & Cameron (2005) and Ferris (2004)

About Design
• Three groups were different; not equivalent (Yao)
• In reality, we are likely to take intact classes and this can create very different contexts; so problematic.
• Another methodological dilemma in error correction: Longitudinal studies (hard to control invariable) vs. One-shot experimental studies (not being longitudinal)
• Pre-test seems missing (Yun Deuk)
• 1st essay can be used as a pre-test or administering a relevant grammar test can be another option.
• Conference for each individual seems very short and not clearly described (Sang-ki)
Probably it is done for a fast check; however 20 min. conference may not be doable.
• Number of errors in Table 1 is just row numbers; so, it is not based on the length of individual essay (Kevin).
• Keeping (internal) ethical requirement for control groups should be considered.

Possible ways for a Better Design
• In Table 2, stating N size may be a good idea
• MANCOVA may be a better tool to analyze since students may have different starting points at the 1st essay, and we have to check individual’s progress in the four essays.
• The design seems complicated, so make the design simpler (one feedback group vs no feedback group)

About Conclusion
• Students showed ups and downs in improving their grammar. Do we need a longer longitudinal study in order to have better ideas?
• Try to look at different categories of errors (rather than all the categories) in order to check students’ improvement
• Conferencing is working, so it should be implemented.
• Treatable vs. not treatable definitions are problematic (e.g., articles in English grammar). These terms are based on intuition.

MyongHee’s thought: In most studies in this area, NS teachers provide error correction in NNS students’ L2 writing. However, in reality, most English teachers in EFL contexts (e.g., Korea, Japan, & China) are NNSs whose English language skills including grammar are not perfect. I wonder to what extent the findings/suggestions and studies of these NS teachers-NNS students studies in written error correction are applicable/relevant to NNS teachers-NNS students contexts.

Weekly reflection (Nov 5th & 8th) by Yuki

2007-11-09T13:15:00.000-10:00

Commentary for November 5th and 8th (by Yukiko)

Sorry for the late reflection notes. Please feel free to comment or modify the text below.

The reading topics of the week were on socio-cultural perspectives to collaborative learning process. Socio-cultural theorists view that learning is socially constructed and is mediated by symbolic artifacts (e.g., language). The following articles were discussed in class:

Tuesday:

Aljaafreh, A., & Lantolf, J. P. (1994). Negative feedback as regulation and second language learning in the zone of proximal development. Modern Language Journal, 78(4), 465-483
Nassaji, H. & Swain, M. (2000). A Vygotskian perspective on corrective feedback in L2; The effect of random versus negotiated help on the learning of English articles. Language Awareness, 9, 34-51.
Nabei, T., & Swain, M. (2002). Learner awareness of recasts in classroom interaction: A case study of an adult EFL student’s second language learning. Language Awareness, 11(1), 43-63.

Thursday:

de Guerrero, M. C. M., & Villamil, O. S. (1994). Social-cognitive dimensions of interaction in L2 peer revision. Modern Language Journal, 78(4), 484-496.
de Guerrero, MCM and Villamil, OS (2000) Activating the ZPD: Mutual scaffolding in L2 peer revision. Modern Language Journal, 84(1), 51-68.

1. Summary and commentary on Tuesday discussion

Researcher’s background:

M. Swain: She shifted her perspective towards L2 learning from cognitive-interactionist to Vygotskian socio-cultural perspective. Nabei and Nassaji were her PhD student.
J. Lantolf: His recent research interest includes linguistic typology and gestures. Aljaafreh was his PhD student.

The fist two studies (Aljaafre & Lantolf, 1994; Nassaji & Swain, 2000) were guided by Vygotsky’s notion of zone of proximal development (ZPD) in analyzing the learning process during tutor-learner dialogic collaborative activity. In this framework, it is considered that the feedback prompt teachers/tutors provide mediates learning (microgenetic learning: learning within a short period of time). Aljaafre and Lantolf provided a very useful framework for identifying twelve levels of implicit to explicit regulatory strategies for feedback prompts (Most implicit prompt: A learner identify error independently; Most explicit prompt: A tutor provides examples of the correct pattern after explicit explanation). Their framework seems very practical and can also be used as a guideline for “graduated” feedback in instruction. David commented that it is natural that many teachers adjust to learners’ ZPD in order to provide effective feedback. In classroom, within peers, different people fill in and contribute to reach an understanding from different ZPD starting points. It’s impossible to adjust to different individual ZPDs in a teacher fronted classroom.

Based on Aljaafre and Lantolf’s (1994) ZPD scale, Nassaji and Swain (2000) examined the difference in learning articles between a student who received corrective feedback with graduated contingent help within ZPD (ZPD condition) and a student who received a randomly gauged help (non ZPD condition). In the random ZPD condition, Nassaji and Swain also explored the relationship between the quality of help provided on each article error and the performance of accuracy in the final test for each article error. They concluded that (a) graduated help was more effective than random help, and (b) that more explicit help produced more accurate results than the implicit help. We have to take these results with caution because of the following reasons:

The two learners seemed to have different proficiency levels in terms of article use from the beginning. The ZPD student made 28 article errors across four tests, while the non-ZPD student made 20 errors (in one wring, the non-ZPD student had perfect article use).
The final test involved an article cloze test of their original writing. The indicator of learning was the accuracy ratio of the article use in the final test for each passage (the number of items ranged from 1 to 12). Since the number of items was so small that concluding the results with proportion score may be misleading. While it seems like a good idea to construct exactly how students learn based on their own writing, from a psychometric viewpoint, the tailored test may not be sufficient to provide trustworthy quantitative evidence.

Some suggestions were made to improve the design of the study. It would be more convincing if there was another article cloze post-test with a passage other than their original writing. Using different passage will potentially show the transfer of learning.

Despite above remarks, the study showed insights into the dynamic and contextualized nature of corrective feedback. Lourdes commented that we can assess necessary teacher/tutor/expert engagement and help the learner needs using the ZPD scale. It will be interesting to see how some students may require more mediation to self regulate and appropriate one type of information.

Nabei and Swain (2002) does not mention social-cultural framework, but looks at the learner as an agent. The learner in the case study “chose when to make use of the learning opportunities presented to her” (p. 59), willingly tuned in and out of the learning context, and was more engaged and cared more during group environment. Nabei and Swain concluded that the reaction to recast a student received was affected by the discourse contexts (e.g., teachers’ intention, group vs. teacher fronted) and learners’ orientation. A close attention to learner agency and orientation, and contextual factors is called for.

Lourdes pointed out that Nabei and Swain’s study is a good example providing thick description of the learner and the interactional context.

2. Summary and commentary on Thursday discussion

A. On IRB issues

We had extensive discussion on IRB issues. Here are some tips getting IRB approvals. Please check with IRB office directly for accurate procedures and information.

(a) Which category do we submit?

If it's a regular educational intervention/instruction and it has no potential harm, usually, our research falls under "exemption" category. You need to go through IRB's criteria to see if your study meets their eligibility criteria for exemption.

(b) Research involves your own students and the intervention is part of your regular teaching practice.

Get approval to use classroom data (e.g., writing, grades, homework, etc.) from your students after providing them course grades.

Ask IRB officer to come to your class at the beginning of the semester to collect information on consent/non-consent to participate in research. IRB will keep the information until the grading is done. Later, you can use the permitted data for your research.

Minimal compensation is fine. You cannot withhold the compensation you promised to provide, even if your participant decided to withdraw in the end.

The rule of thumb is to ask for IRB approval before you start conducting your study!

B. Summary and commentary on the article discussions

Both 1994 study and 2000 study by de Guerrero and Villamil are part of a large scale project involving 40 dyadic (one reader and one writer) interactions during peer revision of their writing.

One of de Guerrero and Villamil’s contributions in 1994 study was their coding system specific to peer interaction for revising writing. They created an analytic framework for categorizing episode type (on-task, about-task, and off-task), interactional types within on-task interaction (e.g., reader writer interactive revision, writer teacher interaction), cognitive stages of regulation (object regulated, other-regulated, and subject-regulated), and social relationships (symmetrical vs. asymmetrical).

Peer review sessions of 27 pairs of ESL writers revealed that most students remained on-task, engaging in complex and productive interaction, and self-regulating themselves depending on tasks and roles (reader or writer). It was interesting to see the fluidity of regulation types, as well as the effect of social relationships on cognitive stages of regulation.

In 2000 study, one dyadic pair uncovered how the reader mediated the revision by flagging problematic phrases and linguistic errors, providing instructions and models, and giving supportive comments. The revision process revealed how social interactions shape the revision of the text and how personal and affective exchanges provide lubrication for equal self-regulations and commitment to task accomplishment.

In both studies, L1 use was considered as a mediating tool and resource for the learners to achieve higher level mental operation. The use of L1 will depend on the dynamic and the purpose of the class; however, it can be a facilitation tool for learners.

In collaborative work, regression is natural in dynamic learning process, as students may not come up with the right answer and/or solution. However, learning does not happen in a linear fashion, thus de Guerrero and Villamil conclude and I concur that peer collaborative work can provide learners with opportunities to appropriate learning strategies and tools which learners can eventually use on their own problem solving.

2007-11-07T12:01:00.000-10:00

Weekly Reflection (W12) by Myong Hee

On Tuesday (L2 writing & Error correction)
Covered Hyland (1998), Hyland (2003), Hyland & Hyland (2006)

Use of feedback
Individual difference in the amount of feedback used and preferences

• Maho – Received more overall feedback but fewer usable ones
Did not incorporate teacher’s feedback much (22%)
Preferred feedback on her ideas (less priority for grammatical accuracy)

• Samorn – Used teacher’s feedback more (82%)
More concerned about grammar & interested in improving this aspect
However, lost her confidence in grammatical competence at the end of course

Dealing with plagiarism
• When citing in writing, students may have different assumptions and practices due to their cultural backgrounds
• Teachers may react differently due to individual and cultural differences.
• When providing feedback regarding plagiarism, which is better: direct vs. mitigated
• A teacher should have been more direct, explicit in dealing with Maho’s unacceptable behavior since she may not be aware of its consequences (Kevin)

Issue of mitigation
• When to be ‘mitigated’ and when to be ‘direct’?
• Teachers need to clarify confusion about feedback (Yukiko)
• Teachers’ indirect feedback seems confusing & not effective based on her own experience as a L2 writer (Yun Deok)
• Sangki – degree of mitigation may be varied depending on types of errors

Lourdes’comments: Terms ‘treatable’ & ‘nontreatable’ by Ferris (1999) are not grounded.

Issue of revision
As a teacher
• For providing good feedback, teachers may take time; the may have better ideas once they knows about their students. Likewise, training may help for effective peer feedback
• When providing feedback, it involves 2 things: (a) how do I do it (b) knowing what student’s intent was

As a student
• Form-focused feedback may not bring in global level revision (Luciana)
• Revision is high level skills: it may involves beyond feedback & not directly related to feedback
• A good writer takes feedback as prompts to generate better ideas to revise the whole text

Lourdes’ comments: We may need future studies on students’ revisions skills or training to revise

Questions to think about
1. Observations in which you recognize yourself as a writing teacher
2. Observations in which you recognize yourself as a writer

weekly reflection (week 10) by Ping and Yao

2007-10-28T21:02:00.000-10:00

I have to thank Yao for taking careful notes in class. I only tweaked it by adding my own notes. I hope the commentary below grasps most of the main ideas we discussed in class. Please feel free to comment on anything I missed. Thank you.

Q: How refined should the transcription be?

From a CA perspective, any pause can carry interactional meaning. It's impossible to determine what a pause means beforehand. The entire interactional context, including prosody, gestures, pauses, and gaze, should be taken into account. Therefore, a careful transcription is necessary. The decision on how refined the transcription should be is really based on the researcher's analytical purposes. Transcriptions are always selective. The bottom line is to be as much faithful as possible to your data. And the transcription system should be consistent in order to avoid confusion. The final transcription is always the result of a series of compromises between faithfulness to the data and the readability of the transcription.

CA's emic interests: studying behavior from inside a particular system, looking at the subsequent turns to interpret the intended actions to be achieved

Emic vs. Etic

This emic vs. etic distinction comes from the study of anthropology.
emic: looking at the data, let the category emerge from the data. The term 'emic' comes from phonemic: study of sound as they represent category that can form contrast (e.g., very vs bury) v and b doesn't make phonemically difference but probably make phonetic difference. Meaning comes from within the participants in the context. From the participants' own perspective, analysts examine what is achieved in the sequential development and how meaning is made relevant to participants. In other words, meaning is situated in the context and can't be described outside the context.

etic: researchers impose the categorization onto the data. It comes from phonetics, study of sound as pronounced physically. The etic viewpoint refers to meanings from the outside perspective but not from the participants.

Hauser (2005): there are possibilities of interpretation and the teacher impose his/her interpretation but we don't know whether it's the intended interpretation is not known. Whether the meaning maintained depends on how the meaning is negotiated.

Q: how can we interpret the action of the participations?

Lourdes: It's like postmodernism: There is no truth out there. There is not the meaning of utterance independent of the context. Without looking at the context, it's impossible to understand how meaning is constructed through the sequence of utterance. In Hauser (2005), he is saying “this is one possibility” “this is my interpretation of this” He's trying to make the best proximal interpretation, but in the end there is no truth. Conversation analyst walks a fine line, it causes the tension how to use the evidence to make the interpretation, which can not be validated.

Ping: It helps to have outsiders to review the data together. It helps me to refine the data and consider alternative interpretations.

Yuki: Two types of approaches are possible:
interpretive approach
emic approach
Lourdes: However, critical conversation analysis is not real conversation analysis.

Subject: intersubjectivity between participants
objectivity is ideal.
Lourdes: Though there is no single true interpretation, but we need to interpret by the best methodology possible. It's a tension between taking “analyzing turn” as the universal methodology to understand “interaction”,while at the same time “turn” can not be interpreted without tightly linked to the context.
In CA studies, there's a lot of hedging in the interpretation, which indicate the author is presenting one interpretation, not the other.

Sangki: the main idea of the article is that meaning is always co-constructed and can not viewed without looking at the context.

Ping: For CA studies, there's a lack of longitudinal works, looking at the same phenomena over time. Also, there is this concern of how to apply results to the pedagogical context..

Lordes: Koshik (2002) is very pedagogically oriented. There's a lot more to meaning. We shouldn't underestimate the actual richness the interactions of how corrections are given and taken. It's a healthy reminder that we shouldn't just do counting. So we have one extreme of analyzing every second of turn to analyze meaning and another extreme of completely deviating from meaning and just counting the number of corrective feedback.
Koshik (2002) talks about how the teacher upgrades and downgrades assistance including the prosody cues. The idea that assistance is incremental is interesting. The utterance was designed to be incomplete to prompt self-correction. CA is all about local sequential context of interaction: How things unfold and build-up to something. For this reason, CA could be used to look at when the assistance is needed, when it should be upgraded, and when it should be withdrawn in the learning process. This is relevant to our reading for next week.

Ending comments from Lourdes: It's interesting that we don't treat other approaches (statistics, cognitive) as marked, but treat CA as marked (too much jargon). The truth is all approaches have their own jargon and they are equally ratified. So when we choose our approach, we don't treat it as default. The approach has to be a good match with the researcher.

Weekly Reflection (W9) by Hung-Tzu

2007-10-23T09:21:00.000-10:00

This week, we continued our oral update on the projects. Four presentations with diverse topics were presented.

Project by Sangki and Mune

Conceptualizing agents in discourse and frequency effects in English L2 learners’ overpassivization errors: A replication and extension of Ju (2000)

Based on cognitive explanation proposed by Ju (2000), overpassivization errors will be examined against three independent variables, causation types ( 2 levles: external vs. internal causers), word token frequency (2 levels, high frequency verbs vs. low frequency verbs), and types of unaccusatives (2 levels, alternating vs. nonalternating unaccusatives). A grammatical judgment test will be used to test intermediate learners (N=20), advanced learners (N=20), and native speakers (N=10).

The class had a brief discussion on the grammatical judgment test including what the participants were asked to judge the sentences, the specific items on the test, and also the distracters included. Since overpassivization is an error commonly found in advanced learners, learners will not have overpassvization errors untill they have passive knowledge. The distracters are designed to test learners’ past knowledge. No errors on overpassivization might either mean that learners are so advanced that they have no problem, or that learners may simply have not acquired passives yet.

Project by Luciana

Focus on form and self repair: Some insights into foreign language learning

Luciana gave us a brief report on the dissertation that she is currently working on. The study asked the following five research questions (1) How do task types influence focus on form and self-repair? (2) To what degree does learners’ proficiency level affect their focus on from and self-repair? (3) What is the nature of linguistic knowledge targeted in focus on form and self repair? (4) How does the interaction depth influence focus on from and interaction pattern? (5) Do learners perform similarly in focus on form and self repair?
This is a very rare study since Luciana looked at group interaction instead of dyads. From her preliminary data analysis, the class suggested using medium to look at group distribution and also individual learner participation within group activities. We also discussed the term ‘depth of LRE’ and it was mentioned that a lower inference label closer to how the study is operationalized such as length of LRE might be able to avoid mis-interpretation from readers.

Project by David

David presented an interesting CALL project in which an alien interacted with learners and give feedback on errors through negotiation of meanings. Suggestions on how the alien project could be expanded included tracking student responses after feedback is given, choosing more generative target structure for the study and providing theoretical ground for this alternative way of giving feedback (i.e. justifying the pedagogical reasons). Yao mentioned that this type of study might be related to human computer interaction or ethnographic research within computer environment. The followings are references that Yao sent to the class list.

Hampel, R. (2003). Theoretical perspectives and new practices in audio-graphic conferencing for language learning. ReCALL, 15(1), 21-36. CALICO (Vol. 20, No. 3); Pujolà (2001) and Bangs (2003); Toole and Heift (2002); Heift (2003).

Project by Dan

Promoting grammar awareness with color-coded feedback

Dan reported his pilot study of color-coding method to give feedback on student writing. The interview from this pilot study revealed that students perceived the system as beneficial in terms of raising meta-awareness. With the short treatment period, Dan suspected that there might not be significant improvement in accuracy of writing, yet, the followings are possible ways to demonstrate the benefit of the color-coding system. (1) Looking into students’ self revision ability at the beginning and at the end of the color-coding treatment might be a way to quantify student learning. (2) Survey designed with Likert scale asking students’ preference in receiving feedback both before and after the treatment. (3) Semi-structured interviews eliciting information on how learners engaged in the revision process using the color-coding system.

Followed by the discussion on the project, we did a hands-on activity applying Dan’s color-coding system to student writing. The activity led to discussion on realistic classroom problems such as how much feedback to give and the many decisions that teachers go through when giving feedbacks.

Weekly Reflection (W8) by BoSun

2007-10-14T19:12:00.000-10:00

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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

Weekly Reflection (W7) by Sorin

2007-10-02T22:35:00.000-10:00

On Tuesday, we started with small group discussions over (1) two points that we either agreed with the article or thought to be important or valuable points from the article, (2) two points that we disagreed with or had reservations about, and (3) 2 points that were beyond the review (which they missed or couldn’t see in 2001, when the article was published).

(1) Agreed or Important/Valuable points
The first group pointed out that the effectiveness of recasts is affected by the target structure of the study in relation to the developmental readiness of learners. In other words, whether learners are ready to acquire the target structure or not will affect the effectiveness of recasts. The second point was made on the types of recasts. Recasts can vary; it can be either explicit/ implicit and provided with or without emphasis utilizing nonlinguistic cues (as Chaudron suggested). These differences can definitely have an impact on the students’ noticing of recasts and consequently the effectiveness of recasts. The third point made was that investigating “private speech” as an indicator of students’ noticing of recasts (Ohta, 2000) was interesting. It could be an interesting measurement of students’ noticing of recasts, however, no research has investigated private speech since Ohta.

Prompted by the third point, we started to discuss the ways of assessing the effectiveness of recasts (or in other words, success or impact of recasts). We’ve looked at the definition of “uptake” made by Lyster & Ranta (1997) on page 739, and found that uptake can be a very slippery term since it covers a range of students’ responses from a simple acknowledgement of recasts to a repetition of recasts (which is called as “echo”) and students’ self repair. Then we moved to the measures used in L1 studies (on page 750). In early L1 studies, children’s imitation of the adult’s recasts was often sought as an evidence of the effectiveness of recasts. However, later on researchers started to investigate emersion of targeted structure in children’s subsequent utterances. On the other hand, in L2 reserach, various measures were used, as follows:

- Interlanguage change: It was investigated mostly in laboratory studies, at least in short term period, through pretest and posttest design (sometimes with delayed posttest).

- Immediate reactions to recasts: uptake, repair, etc.

- Private speech: It was used only in Ohta’s study (2000), in whihc students were more likely to react to recasts when it was addressed to another learner or to class than to them.

- Learners’ perception: Learner’s perception of recasts was investigated through stimulated recall (Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000).

- Primed production: Primed production is learner’s production of a new utterance using the target structure in a few turns after recasts, and was first investigated by McDonough & Mackey (2006). In their study, learner’s production within six turns after recasts was examined.

Another important point made in class was that the effectiveness of recasts can vary depending on the setting of the study as follows:

- Intensive vs. Extensive: Regarding the density of feedback provision (how many errors were corrected and how often those errors were corrected)

- Specific vs. Broad: Regarding the range of forms corrected (whether only errors on particular structures were corrected (Doughty & Varela, 1998; Ortega & Long, 1997) or a broad range of errors were corrected (Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Oliver, 1995))

- Proactive vs. Reactive: Regarding the existence of pre-selected target structures in studies (whether there was specific target structure to teach or no particular structure was pre-selected and thus correction was incidental to learner errors)

- Communicative vs. Formal (overall context): Regarding the nature of classroom setting (whether the nature of classroom is communicative, content-based (immersion), or formal; whether it is in foreign language context or second language context, etc.)

- Relational feedback by teacher vs. Detached or predominantly cognitive feedback: Regarding personal, affective, and social factors affecting the dynamics of interaction (whether fine-tuned feedback was provided in consideration of the socioclutural factors of the preexisting relationships or predominantly cognitive feedback was provided disregarding these factors, most likely among the participants with no prior relationships)

What constitutes positive evidence and negative evidence was the last important point made in class. Even though several studies (Iwashita, 2003; Leeman, 2003; Long et al, 1998; McDonough & Mackey, 2006) tapped into this issue, no study has provided a review of this line of research. It seemed like that recasts provide both negative evidence and positive evidence at the same time but recasts make positive evidence more salient according to Ortega. In addition, the effectiveness of recasts comes from both positive and negative evidence.

(2) Disagreement or Criticism
The first point addressed was that there was disagreement in the definition of recasts, which inevitably caused comparability problem among the recasts studies. Also, the findings of L1 studies cannot be compared to the results of L2 studies (Sangki). In addition, no study has ever paid attention to paralinguistic cues provided with recasts. Second, the narrative literature review of this article seemed to be limited in synthesizing the findings of the previous studies, even though it was well written and helpful. This article can be regarded as authoritative review which was written by renowned scholars. Yukiko suggested to read the last chapter of Mackey’s forthcoming book, and we will read *Russell & Spada (2006) as well. Kevin also mentioned that it seemed that there are more similarities in L2 studies than L1 studies in recasts disagreeing with what the authors suggested in the article.

(3) Beyond the review
No study in recasts has investigated paralinguistic cues provided with recasts except Sheen (2006?), and thus we need to take into consideration the paralinguistic cues as well in our studies by analyzing oral or audio-visual data. In addition, the effect of students’ familiarity with teacher’s teaching style on recasts was not much considered in previous studies. Chaudron's dissertation was the only study showing that teachers less corrected learner errors at the end of semester than the beginning of the semester, and some studies on motivation have shown that there was fluctuation of motivation during a semester. Thus, it would be interesting to see how various aspects of recasts change as relational aspects of classroom setting change. Third, L1 studies showed that as children grow older (in other words, as their proficiency developed), the provision of recasts was decreased. Thus, it would be worth collecting classroom observation data across entire curriculum and investigating how the amount of recasts changes as students’ proficiency develops. Another point made by Myunghee was that since most of the studies in recasts have looked at NS-NNS interaction, it would be interesting to examine NNS-NNS interaction.

*Russell, J., & Spada, N. (2006). The effectiveness of corrective feedback for the acquisition of L2 grammar: A meta-analysis of the research. In J. M. Norris & L. Ortega (Eds.), Synthesizing research on language learning and teaching (pp. 133-164). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ellis, R., & Sheen, Y. (2006). Reexamining the role of recasts in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 575-600.

Iwashita, N. (2003). Negative feedback and positive evidence in task-based interaction: Differential effects on L2 development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 1-36.

On Thursday, we started with a small group discussion on two things that were already brought up in Nicholas et al. (2001) and two things that were forward-looking agendas in Ellis & Sheen (2006). After a group discussion, we had a whole class discussion. Then, Noriko Iwashita came in and told us about her study (Iwashita, 2003) and her experience of conducting studies in error correction: difficulties, concerns, and helpful tips.

(1) Issues already brought up
The first issue pointed out in both articles was that recasts are ambiguous since they are not always noticed by learners as corrective feedback and thus they are considered to be less effective compared to other types of feedback moves. However, the next question raised by Ortega was that the fact that learners miss the corrective function of recasts (i.e. not perceiving them as corrective) does really mean that they do not perceive it? Ellis and Sheen claimed that “whether recasts afford positive or negative evidence is tied up with how learners interpret their illocutionary force” (p. 585). Put another way, if learners do not interpret recasts as corrective, then recasts only serve as positive evidence. On the other hand, if learners perceive them as corrective, then they provide negative evidence. We agreed that overall learner’s orientation toward interaction is important. However, our conclusion was that recasts do not necessarily need to be perceived as didactic to be regarded as a source of negative evidence. Definitional differences in recasts studies were also addressed in both articles. Not only definitional differences but a variety of recasts (different types of recasts) was also mentioned, although Ellis & Sheen provided more expanded discussion on this issue. Besides, the two articles dealt with the role of uptake; uptake cannot be an evidence of acquisition even though it can be an evidence of noticing.

(2) Forward-looking agendas
How to define implicit or explicit recasts and how to operationalize the degree of explicitness was the first agenda pointed out. Ellis & Sheen pushed this issue forward by discussing different types of recasts. Second, Ellis & Sheen elaborated the importance of sociocognitive perspective, which was also discussed in Nicholas et al. We will read some of the chapters, on this issue, from Hyland & Hyland book (2006) later on. Third, they further expanded the argument about the effectiveness of recasts on acquisition and suggested that we should consider not only whether recasts facilitate acquisition but also when and how they do so. Adding to this claim, Ortega proposed that we should also compare the effect of recasts with other types of feedback moves in pursuing this issue of not only “whether” but also “how” and “when”. There are variations in each corrective feedback moves, and it could be the case that types of feedback do not really matter. What really matters and what requires further investigation can be some other level of abstraction, such as the degree of explicitness, cutting across different moves instead of classifying different moves. Forth, Ellis and Sheen seemed to conclude that explicit correction is more effective than recasts and the more explicit a correction move can be, the better it is. With this claim, Yundeok raised a question; if explicit correction only leads to building explicit knowledge, what about implicit knowledge? Ellis, however, didn’t really mention this issue in the article, and he seemed to be just concerned with acquisition benefit of recasts in general sense. Fifth, learner’s orientation to discourse (whether learners see language as an object or as a tool to convey meaning) was more elaborated in Ellis & Sheen. It is possible that, if learner’s orientation is toward accuracy, then they will perceive recasts as corrective, even though the context is communicative as Lyster (2006, 2007) suggested.

In addition to these agendas, several important and interesting issues were discussed. With regard to target structures, Nicholas et al. concluded that recasts are more effective with already known forms (p. 730, 752). On the other hand, Lyster hypothesized that recasts are more effective with new forms which haven’t learned, and prompts (or models?) are more effective with already learned forms. Thus, further investigating this issue, confirming any of the hypothesis, would be worthwhile. Another interesting claim Kevin brought up was that fewer recasts can make it more salient, which was also suggested in Nicholas et al (p.743, p.728). In L1 child acquisition, parents rarely recast their children’s utterances thus making recasts easy to notice for children. However, in L2 classrooms, recasts are too frequently offered and thus making them less “marked” instead of being salient Furthermore, parents recast incorrect utterances more frequently than repeat correct utterance, and children repeat corrective recasts more than mere confirmation of their utterances (Nicholas et al., p. 726, 729, 740, 751). Therefore, it would be interesting to examine the frequency issue as well as uptake after corrective utterances versus non-corrective utterances. As last issue, Yundeok pointed out that studies haven’t really looked at teacher’s perception of recasts but only learner’s perception, except Nabei & Swain (2002), which we will read later on. Adding to this comment, Ortega suggested that it would be best to include pre-posttest gain, learner’s (and possibly teacher’s) perception, and discourse data in recasts studies. Up to now, studies have examined only one of them in isolation, except the only exception of Iwashita (2003): she included pre-posttest gain and discourse data. Besides, Ortega mentioned that primed production as shown in excerpt 1 (p. 576) would be new benefit of recasts, what researchers were looking for.

(3) Noriko Iwashita
The hardest part of conducing studies in error correction for her was to code and to analyze data, particularly positive and negative evidence, reaching high intercoder reliability. In her study, she defined positive evidence as instances that NS initially use target structures or vocabulary followed by a NNS’s targetlike or incomplete utterance providing a target model of structures in focus. Selecting appropriate target structure for beginning JSL learners was difficult as well; she was looking for a new structure, however, the learners already had learned most of the structures, even though they were in the second semester of learning Japanese (less than 20 weeks of instruction in pseudo-communicative classrooms). She also faced a problem with developmental readiness with the progressive –te verb form. While some of the students understood it as a structure, other students learned it as words (like chunks), which brought another problem when she coded the data. She also advised us to consider what kind of statistics to use for data analysis in advance and to report individual data in our studies as well.

In order to help your understanding, the followings are a brief summary of her study. In an experimental study, she investigated the role of task-based conversation in the development of two Japanese structures (locative initial construction and a progressive verb form) by 55 L2 learners of Japanese, focusing on positive evidence and negative feedback. What made her study special was that she did not only examine pretest and posttest gain but also analyzed interaction data. Analyzing the interaction data enabled her to identify three types of positive evidence (completion, translation, and simple model) and two types of negative feedback (recasts and negotiation) provided by NS interlocutors during interaction. Among the moves, models were the most frequently provided one followed by recasts. Task-based conversation was proved to be effective for the JSL learners learning the two target structures. However, mixed results were found regarding the effectiveness of positive evidence and negative feedback. Models (positive evidence) were found to be effective on locative construction only for the learners with above-average scores on pretest (at the threshold level of proficiency) while recasts were effective on the progressive –te verb form regardless of learners’ current mastery of target structures.

Weekly reflection (Week 6) by Sang-Ki

2007-09-27T22:36:00.000-10:00

We covered four studies this week: Oliver (1995), Lyster & Ranta (1997), Ortega & Long (1997), and Doughty & Varela (1998).

The comparability is always a thorny issue, but we could still be better informed about the role of feedback by trying to compare each study’s design and main findings from a single line. The following summary would be insightful from that sense:

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Oliver (1995)

Laboratory study

Descriptive study (No particular focused targets; No casual explanation)

* Ss: 8-13-year-old ESL learners (16 dyads)

* Two feedback types in focus: Negotiation vs. recasts

* Main findings: Negative feedback was given to 61% of the students’ entire error moves (that is, 39% of error moves were ignored). Negotiation tended to be used when the meaning is opaque to NS interlocutors, whereas recasts were common when the meaning was transparent but the form was problematic. “Negotiation seems to serve to make the picture clear, whereas recasts are like straightening the picture on the wall” (p. 473). NS responses tended to be affected by several factors such as the type and complexity of learner errors. Learners seemed to successfully incorporate negative feedback (35% of recasts were incorporated).

Lyster & Ranta (1997)

Classroom study

Descriptive study (No particular focused targets; No casual explanation)

* Ss: 10-year-old content-based French immersion learners

* 20 hrs classroom observation, 4 classrooms, 4 teachers

* 6 types of feedback and subsequent uptake moves (4 types of repair & 6 types of needs-repair) were in focus

* Main findings: Recasts were used most often (55% of error turns induced teacher recasts). 69% of recasts were unnoticed, only resulting in topic continuation. Of the rest 31% of recasts which led to student turns with uptake, 18% and 13% resulted in repair and needs-repair turns, respectively. Compared to recasts (which only led to simple repetition of previous feedback turns), elicitation and metalinguistic feedback were more effective in that they might cause student-generated repair. More important is the observation that elicitation and metalinguistic feedback did not interfere with the flow of communication.

Ortega & Long (1997)

Laboratory study

Quasi-experimental study (Particular focused targets)

* Other related studies: Long et al. (1998), Inagaki & Long (1998)

* Ss: 3rd semester Spanish (low-intermediate level adult learners) (30 dyads)

* Two feedback types in focus: Recasts (negative feedback) vs. models (positive feedback)

* Targets: Object topicalization & Adverb placement (Both were previously unknown structures)

* Pre-posttest control group design

* Main findings: Both types of feedback did not bring about significant learning of object topicalization. Recasts were more effective than models in learning of the adverb placement rule.

Doughty & Varela (1998)

Classroom study

Quasi-experimental study (Particular focused targets)

* Ss: 11-14-year-old content-based ESL learners

* Targets: past tense –ed & conditional would

* One feedback type in focus: Corrective recasts

* Pre-post-delayed posttest control group design

* Main findings: The focused recasts led to substantial gains on oral mode tests and the beneficial effects were maintained 2 months later. Gains on written mode tests were less robust. FonF is feasible, but should be brief, immediate, focused, and not to be overused.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

After outlining the contrasting features of the four studies, we focused more on Ortega and Long’s (1997) quasi-experimental laboratory type study. We could be aware of the detailed experiment procedures by listening to actual task samples. (It was of particular interest to see that the GJT used by the researchers was not a conventional, decontextualized one).

In light of the study findings, even though the two targets were presumed to be at the same developmental stages, only the adverb placement rule was learned when recasts were provided to Spanish learners. Object topicalization rule might have been too difficult to observe the expected learning outcomes. By contrast, the adverb placement rule, which is more related to lexical items, could have been more learnable. What was interesting from the follow-up interview data was the fact that some learners, although they could not reply to the question as to what they actually had learned overall, tended to state the adverb placement rule accurately, indicating noticing of the rule truly occurred during the task performance.

An improvement of the study design could have been made with delayed posttest measures included. Also, rather than the repeated measures design, a combinatorial design with two feedback types and two target structures would have enabled us to have a clearer understanding of the roles of the two feedback types.

On Thursday, we focused on two of the four studies. Oliver (1995) and Lyster & Ranter (1997) that we covered are all descriptive recast studies. In pairs, we tried to find answers to the following five questions. I am including the answers and ideas we shared as a whole-class discussion format:

1) How frequent was negative feedback in each study?
* Oliver (1995; hereafter O): 38.82%
* Lyster & Ranta (1997; hereafter LR): 62%
* Different task conditions as well as idiosyncratic participant characteristics of the two studies may have resulted in this huge difference in the amount of feedback. For example, in the case of Oliver (1995), it was kids who gave feedback to their peers and the study was laboratory-based, which might have affected the reported smaller amount of negative feedback.
* LR: There seems a difference across teachers in the amount of negative feedback.
* O: Providing raw frequency data (instead of percentage values) would have been more desirable.

2) How was negative feedback provided (how many different ways, what range of explicitness) in each study?
* O: 2 types; negotiation and recasts
* LR: 6 types; recasts, elicitation, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, explicit correction, repetition; these 6 types of feedback may exist on the implicit-explicit continuum.
* It came to be acknowledged that recasts may take an explicit form.

3) What evidence does each of the two studies consider in order to talk about "effectiveness” of negative feedback? (Do they talk about “effectiveness,” and if so what arguments do they consider?)
* LR: Effectiveness is discussed in terms of the extent of uptake and repair. Particularly, student-generated repair, which is different from uptake and simple repair, is important in telling the effectiveness of negative feedback.
* O: Feedback is available and usable. Negative feedback seems effective from the point that learners tended to incorporate NS’s feedback in subsequent turns (e.g., 35% of recasts were incorporated).

4) How did participants respond to negative feedback in each study? (what did they do with it, if anything?) -- Skipped

5) What did each study have to say about type of error?
* O: Detailed categories of grammatical errors were identified. Recasts were significantly more common than negotiations for errors in singularity, plurality, and subject-verb agreement. For other cases (e.g., Aux/copula, pronoun, word order/omission, word choice, no subject), negotiations were the preferred feedback option.
* LR: Grammatical errors (50%) are the most common error type, followed by lexical (18%), phonological (16%), and L1-related errors (16%). Lexical and phonological errors (80% and 70%) induced teacher feedback more than grammatical and L1-related errors (56% and 43%). This reminded us the findings from Mackey et al.’s (2000) study, suggesting the saliency and correctability issue in relation to each type of error. Recasts were the more preferred option across different error types, whereas negotiation of form was more common than recasts for lexical-related errors.

Refletion on Thursday, September, 13th by Yun Deok Choi.

2007-09-16T01:26:00.000-10:00

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.

Reflection on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 by Yun Deok Choi

2007-09-16T01:23:00.000-10:00

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.

Commentary Tues, September 4th, 2007 (Y. Watanabe)

2007-09-08T04:30:00.000-10:00

We started off by talking about the importance of footnote chasing while reading the articles. Footnote chasing is a research strategy to locate key resources on a topic by searching the reference sections of a paper. It will be easier to retrieve relevant literature for your own study, if you flag footnote chased articles and make notes. From my experience conducting meta-analysis, I would also recommend making notes and keywords in the Endnote software. Accumulation of those notes and keywords in the Endnote makes graduate students’ life much easier when it comes to writing a literature review. So far, each classmate has reviewed two articles. Among the reviewed articles, we were cautioned not to cite Frank Morris’s work.

For the rest of the class, we were engaged in mini error correction task. We first listed types of teacher written feedback on students’ writing and the types of error analysis in research. The following categories were identified.

Teacher

Types of feedback:

direct feedback (making correction with/without explanation)
indirect feedback (marking the location and/or type/nature of the error, clarification request)
metalinguistic feedback (explanation of the error)

Modes and manner of feedback:

conferencing, peer response
paper vs. electronic

Researcher

- Overall accuracy (nature of the error, all error noteworthy of focus)

- Specific error:

article
verb morphology (tense, aspect, subject agreement)
preposition

The class was divided into six groups taking the role either as a teacher (direct FB and indirect FB group) or as a researcher (overall accuracy, article error, verb morphology error, and preposition error group) to analyze the error of a students’ writing sample. In a group, we identified errors and discussed the difficulty of providing or analyzing the errors. Summarized below are the key takeaways from the discussion:

Teacher difficulty from direct group:

It’s difficult as a teacher to provide feedback without knowing what stage of draft the writing is, the learning objectives, and learners’ proficiency and background.
Form vs. content
- Making a distinction between lexical and grammar error.
- Distinguishing local versus global error.
Different teachers focused on different errors (very erratic).

Teacher difficulty from indirect group:

Knowledge about the content of the writing (e.g., history in our writing sample) may be needed to accurately identify verb tense errors (e.g., past perfect). Especially personal narratives will be difficult to correct. Making corrections may change the content. Sometimes we need to ask clarification questions instead of direct correction.
Uniformity of coding. People use different coding system.

Researcher difficulties

Where does the error begin and end?
How can you clearly classify errors? (difficulty of form versus content)
It’s difficult to determine what the nature of the error is. What do you do with idiomatic errors that are grammatically correct?
It will be hard to determine the overall accuracy for intermediate level students’ writing. As the learners’ sentences become more complex, the more difficult to define what the nature of the error is.

Through the mini-error correction task, I learned how difficult and time consuming it is as a teacher or as a researcher to truly understand the linguistic (local) error of students’ writing. I am curious about the decision making process of teachers and researchers’ error identification and classification.

For next Tuesday:

Read Truscott (1999) and Lyster et al.’s (1999) commentary.

Reminder for next Tuesday:

“Verb morphology error group” needs to give a short summary on the tense errors (past perfect).

Commentary on Sep. 6

2007-09-06T17:28:00.000-10:00

Thursday: meet at PC lab and work on wiki

We first googled "second language acquisition" and logged on to the wikipedia's SLA page.

David: Please take a look at how it is structured. Browse the wikipedia page. See what's included/missing/all the info out there.
Sangki: I'm going to show you how to edit infomation and use page history.

That went on for a few minutes as Sangi explained how it worked.

Next, we went to SLS 750 wiki homepage. there was nothing...we had to do SOMETHING with it.

Sangki taught us how to make a new page, create a link, make an external link, and then link everything together. After the lesson, we gave it a try and played with it for 10 minutes.

Then, we started creating the first page for our wiki. Brainstorming for table of contents took quite a while. Here's the list we came up with:

1. Definition of error feedback
2. Types of error feedback
oral vs. written
teacher vs. learner-initiated
implicit vs. explicit
feedback on form vs. content
feedback on oral vs. written language
offline vs. online
intensive vs. extensive
reactive vs. preactive
group ve. individualized
(David was busy typing everything in.)
It's when we were about to make the third one that we started having trouble with bullets, numbers, all that stuff. We decided to clean it up at another time.

We went back to the first one on the list: definition of error feedback, trying to create a page for it. Here's what we wrote:

Error feedback is a reaction to students' interlanguage performance.

Then, Sangki suggested everyone edit the page, add their own information to it, and make new pages, just to see what happened when people were editing it simultaneously. That kept us busy for 5 minutes. Sangki walked around and asked us NOT to change the main page.

Final goal of the day: create a new page, make a link, and save it.
Thank Sangki and David for go over the basics with us.
Now you can check out our wiki website and add your comments!

Yongyan & Flowerdew (2007): Reviewed by Y. Watanabe

2007-09-04T14:54:00.000-10:00

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'

2007-09-04T09:25:00.000-10:00

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

2007-09-04T01:10:00.000-10:00

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

2007-09-04T00:19:00.001-10:00

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.

Nelson & Carson (2006) evaluation by Ping

2007-09-03T21:26:00.000-10:00

Nelson, G. & J. Carson. (2006). Cultural issues in peer response: Revisiting ‘culture.’ In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (eds.), 42-59.

This article is quite easy to read. I was able to read it without constantly thinking of getting more coffee, so that's good. And it's short, too. I'm very grateful I picked this one :)

In the article, Nelson and Carson argue that culture could be a contextual factor in the effectiveness of peer response. In their study on peer group interactions, they found the three Chinese participants all expressed their reluctance to disagree with other peers' comments and their desire to maintain the harmony of the group. Their shared cultural expectations seem to explain why they didn't give negative feedback to their peers and why they held back their criticism. The students found it difficult to participate successfully in peer response interactions because giving negative feedback works against their cultural values. Therefore, the effectiveness of peer feedback is discounted. Nelson and Carson then hypothesize that cultural backgrounds may influence the dynamics of group interactions and further play a role in the effectiveness of peer feedback.

They also pointed out that the construct of “culture” is controversial. Using it as a contextual factor has been critiqued by postmodern, post-structuralist, and post-colonial theorists as reductionist, assuming culture to be static and coherent. The authors illustrate the debate on culture-stereotype connection at some length and, in the end, they take a stance by saying that there is “a systematic, culturally determined way in which all members in a certain culture think, behave, and act” (Nelson & Carson, 1994, p. 14). There are multiple causes of successful and unsuccessful peer feedback. By examining possible cultural effects in peer feedback, the study aims to highlight the complex variables in providing quality feedback.

Overall, I enjoy reading it. I'll recommend it to anyone who is interested in cross-cultural issues and contextual elements of peer feedback interactions. The article doesn't require any background knowledge. Even if you are not familiar with peer response, you will not have much trouble reading it.

However, my problem with the article is I still don't know how to tease apart the contextual factors the authors investigated. I mean, how much can we say that the effectiveness is culture-related? How much can we say we are not making stereotype connection when we talk about cultural homogeneity? These questions seem to linger in my mind.

2007-09-03T21:22:00.000-10:00

Evaluation of Morris (2002) by Myong Hee

Morris, F. (2002). Negotiation moves and recasts in relation to error types and learner repair in the foreign language classroom. Foreign Language Annals, 35(4), 395-404.

This study investigates interaction of adult beginning learners of Spanish in the foreign language classroom. Forth-two students formed pairs and worked on the same jigsaw task. Their interaction was coded for types of error (syntactic/lexical), types of negative feedback (explicit/recasts/negotiation moves), and repair. Findings show that (1) they did not use explicit negative feedback; however, they provided implicit negative feedback (70% of errors received); (2) syntactic errors tended to invite recasts, whereas lexical errors tended to invite negotiation moves; (3) they tended to repair ill-formed utterance immediately, but the frequency of repaired errors followed feedback was low; and (4) all syntactic repairs and the majority of lexical repairs followed negotiation moves.

I found this article useful. The role of interaction has been central in SLA and accordingly pair and small group activities have been promoted in the L2 classroom. Along with a CLT approach, a small group activity has been highly encouraged in order to promote student-centered class and to improve fluency through practicing a target language. In the case of EFL context, a small group activity is the major source of learner interaction, along with teacher-learner interaction. As I promote a lot of group work in my classes, I have been curious to know whether it is beneficial to my students. This study reveals what is going on between NNS learners while interacting in dyads. It may be a good example to those who want to investigate a similar study in other FL classrooms.

I’d like to recommend this article to be added to our SLS 750. As I mentioned above, peer correction is another important feedback area to explore. I guess there are some (at least a few) who are planning to look into peer feedback in the FL/SL classroom. For those, this study may be a good reference.

Evaluation of Bitchener, Young, & Cameron (2005) by Hung-Tzu

2007-09-03T21:13:00.000-10:00

Bitchener, J., Young, S., & Cameron, D. (2005). The effect of different types of corrective feedback on ESL student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 14, 191-205.

Bitchener, Young, and Cameron (2005) examined how different types of corrective feedback on linguistic errors determine accuracy performance in learner writing. 53 post-intermediate adult ESL learners were divided into three treatment groups: direct written feedback on the target features, direct written corrective feedback + 5 minute student-researcher conference, and no corrective feedback on the target features. In four different pieces of writing within 12 weeks, learners’ errors on the use of preposition, simple past tense, and definite articles were corrected. The study found that when the three targeted errors were considered as a single group, the type of feedback provided did not have a significant effect on accuracy, however, when linguistic categories were considered separately, the types of feedback had a significant effect on the accuracy performance. Learners who were in the written feedback + conference group outperformed the other two groups significantly in accuracy performance of simple past tense and definite articles, but not prepositions.

The researchers indicated that the difference of learner improvement on the three linguistic errors could be explained with the notions of “treatable” and “untreatable” errors proposed by Ferris (1999). Ferris distinguished “treatable” and “untreatable” errors, defining the former as rule-governed error (such as verb tense forms) and the letter as idiosyncratic error, which require learners’ acquired language knowledge to correct the error (such as word choice). Based on the results of Bitchener et al., more “treatable” errors (in this case, the use of simple past tense and definite articles) were amendable through explicit written feedback and one-to-one conferences in which rules were explained and clarified.

Rather than examining the accuracy performance with text revision on the same writing, Bitchener et al. specifically stated that this study attempted to investigate long-term improvement of linguistic features by using four new pieces of writing within 12 weeks. Since one of the most crucial factors contributing to the diverse results in written corrective feedback research lies in the difference on how researchers define effectiveness, Bitchener et al. were careful in formulating what they intend to measure. The results showed that there was significant variation in accuracy performance across the four pieces of writing and that learners’ progress did not show a linear and upward pattern, leading the researchers to suggest that in order to measure long-term effect of corrective feedback on writing, a period longer than a semester is needed.

I think the article is straightforward and therefore fairly easy to read. With a brief summery of the Truscott and Ferris debate as a start, the study offers a clear picture of the research and discussion involved in whether and how to give L2 learners feedback on their written grammatical error. For those who are familiar with the domain, this article could be a nice review, and for those who are more interested in oral corrective feedback, this could be an introduction to read without going much into details. My overall evaluation to the article is therefore “recommended”.

One article that seem particular interesting to me when reading this study was:

Ferris, D. R., & Roberts, B. (2001). Error feedback in L2 writing classes: How explicit does it need to be? Journal of Second Language Writing, 10, 161-184.

The distinction on “treatable” and “untreatable” errors was examined in this study. Since lexical errors were categorized as a more “untreatable” error, looking at how lexical errors were treated in this study will help me fine-tune my own research.

Evaluation of McDonough(2005)'s article by Yun Deok Choi

2007-09-03T19:54:00.000-10:00

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.

2007-09-03T19:43:00.000-10:00

Sachs and Polio (2007) by Kevin

Learners' Uses of Two Types of Written Feedback on a L2 Writing
Revision Task SSLA, 29, 67-100

This study is an attempt to determine the effectiveness of two types of feedback in improving learners written grammatical accuracy. The two types are error correction; here defined as direct correction of student's mistakes with the correct forms provided by the teacher, and reformulation; here defined as maintaining the meaning but not necessarily the form by rewriting the student's incorrect sentences in a more native like way. Reformulations with think-aloud comments were also examined to study student's awareness of their reformulations and the effect that this has on the effectiveness of the reformulation. Because of possible problems with the error correction part of the first study, a second study was done with a larger n size was done to control for these effects. In both studies, error correction was shown to be more effective than both kinds of reformulations in improving students written grammar. In addition, reformulations + think aloud were shown to be of limited use in studying awareness and noticing due to the interfering effect and extra cognitive load that is required to verbally report on awareness.

On the bright side, this article mentions the idea of depth of processing, which is popular among vocabulary acquisition researchers and which we talked about on the second day of class. The researchers believe that this concept should be imported to error correction research in general, which I think may be a good idea. This article also discusses in some detail the idea of how noticing is related to acquisition through error feedback. Examining the role of noticing at the level of awareness (superficial linguistic level) and at the level of understanding (knowledge of linguistic rules and metacognitive linguistic knowledge) is a secondary goal of the research here.
Both depth of processing and a more nuanced notion of noticing are important ideas and this article may prod other researchers into taking a look at these areas. Unfortunately this study doesn't contribute much to the discussion.

In addition to the awkward title of this paper, there are several problems, which for the most part, the authors are aware of and state clearly, with the design of the experiment. While it is interesting that the authors bring up the idea of depth processing, they choose direct reformulations as a way to test their hypothesis. According to the authors, the following sentences are examples of a reformulation and error correction:

As he was jogging, his tammy was shaked ORIGINAL
As he was jogging, his tummy was shaking. REFORMULATION

As he was jogging his tammy(crossed out and rewritten) was shaked(crossed out as rewritten as shaking)

As is obvious, they are very nearly the same thing. The first reformulation would not require much depth of processing and most likely result in students just copying the answer.
At any rate, the results show that error correction is more effective, but the researchers admit that the design of the experiment encouraged students to simply memorize the correct feedback and that the error correction results were better simply because the format, and not the type of feedback was different. So at best, we have superficial, short term improvement of grammar points that may or may not be due to the type of feedback, which doesn't tell us much.
One interesting result of the experiment is that it reinforced the idea that students providing verbal feedback about their state of awareness during error correction interferes with the error correction and should therefore be controlled for.

This was not an especially thrilling read. If you are in love with quantitative statistical analysis (Here is a test, what is the exact definition of a Kruskal-Wallis Test?) then you might be interested in this one because the authors use every trick in the book to make up for the fact that their n size is too small and there is no normal distribution to work with. Otherwise, you will find yourself skipping down to the results and discussion.

I don't recommend this one, but it raises a few good questions.

Minutes from week 2

2007-09-02T20:56:00.000-10:00

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:

effectiveness

context (recent realization; what does this mean for different research traditions?; how much 'context' can we account for in any particular study?)

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

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.

Notes on Storch (2007) and pair work

2007-09-02T11:29:00.000-10:00

Storch, N. (2007). Investigating the merits of pair work on a text editing task in ESL classes. Language Teaching Research, 11, 143–159.

While the merits of group-work in second language classrooms has already been established, this study aims to address the gap in research comparing small group with individual work. The three research questions of the study are as follows:

1) Do learners working in pairs complete an editing task more accurately than learners who complete the task individually?
2) What is the nature of the learners' talk when working in pairs on an editing task?
3) Do learners reach grammatically correct decisions when deliberating over grammar?

For the study, four intact, upper-intermediate ESL classes at an Australian university were employed. Class A completed an editing task in pairs while students in class B completed the task individually. To investigate whether students prefer working on grammar-based tasks in pairs, students in classes C and D were given the option to work individually or with a partner. The task itself called for editing an authentic piece of writing (done by an ESL student from a previous session) that was manipulated to contain 19 error items typical of students at this level.

The results show a slight increase in accuracy for students working in pairs (who, on average, took longer to complete the task and made more amendments to the text), but the difference is not statistically significant. While the difference in mean scores with regard to those students who had the option to work alone or with a partner is greater — accounted for, perhaps, by higher motivation — it, too, is not statistically significant. This may not seem like a strong sell to encourage more group work in the second language classroom, but the study also finds that weaker students in particular may be at a disadvantage when working alone, and that pair work seems to provide learners with the most opportunities to engage interactively with the language and initiate self-repair.

Compared to other studies I've read, this one was relatively straightforward and rather pleasant to read, actually. It was of particular interest as I promote a lot of group work in my own classes, and it was nice to be reminded of the real benefits to learners that derive from this type of activity — even if the study itself didn't turn up significant evidence in favor or group work on the whole. Again, this is only one study.

As for it's usefulness for this class, I would have to say that there isn't a great deal pertaining to error correction per se, and therefore give it a gentle 'thumbs down'. If you want more evidence of why pair work is effective for certain learners dealing with a certain task type, I'd say give it a look over; otherwise, I think you'll be satisfied with the summary of research results stated above.

Evaluation of Ferris (2006) by Sachiko

2007-08-31T17:21:00.000-10:00

Ferris, D. (2006). Does error feedback help student writers? New evidence on the short- and long-term effects of written error correction. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (pp.81-104). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Debate about the value of providing corrective feedback on L2 writing has been prominent in recent years as a result of Truscott (1996) who claimed that it is both ineffective and harmful and should therefore be abandoned. Dana Ferris is probably one of the most well-known researchers who have rigorously refuted Truscott by providing additional evidence on positive effects of error feedback in L2 writing. This book chapter is her latest work that summarizes research findings on: (1) the effects of error feedback on improvement in the short run and in the long run; (2) the impact of teacher marking strategies on students’ revisions; and (3) the relationship between error types and error treatment. Data for the study was collected in six sections of an ESL composition class where students (N=92) completed four three-draft persuasive essays over the semester. In order to investigate students’ long-term development, all three drafts of the first and fourth essays with teacher feedback were analyzed. The analysis of students’ responses from one draft to the next of a particular paper revealed that the student writers were able to successfully edit errors marked by teachers (80% of all the errors were successfully corrected). However, the longitudinal analysis showed that students’ short-term ability to edit certain types of errors (article errors, lexical errors, and sentence errors) did not always translate to long-term improvement (only “verb-form” demonstrated the progress over the semester). The analysis of teachers’ marking patterns illustrated that students utilized direct feedback more effectively than indirect feedback, since it involved mere transcribing or copying the teacher’s suggestion into the next draft of their papers. However, less explicit forms of feedback also led to accurate revisions most of the time. The analysis of student revision outcomes by error types elucidated that teachers responded to different types of errors in different ways. Specifically, “treatable” errors (errors that could occur in a rule-governed way: verb tense or forms, subject-verb agreement, run-ons, fragments, etc) were more often marked indirectly, while “untreatable” errors (no set of rules students can consult to avoid or fix errors: word choice, idioms, and the sentence structure) were overwhelmingly marked directly.

Ferris’s work fills an important niche in attempting to examine the longitudinal effects of teacher feedback and the effect of different types of feedback (direct/indirect) on different error types (treatable/untreatable). She provided evidence that students’ immediate revisions did not always lead to their longer term development. This evidence implies that students’ ability to utilize teacher feedback to successfully edit one draft for the next of a particular paper is not equivalent to their successful acquisition of the linguistic construct addressed by the feedback, and thus gives us a significant implication regarding the relationship between correction and learning. Ferris’s attempt to classify error types into treatable and untreatable ones is also invaluable. She found that treatable errors were more likely to be marked indirectly than untreatable errors which were more often marked directly. Of particular importance is that the indirect feedback that students received on verb errors may have helped them over time because verb form demonstrated the long-term improvement in accuracy. This means that indirect feedback can encourage learner reflection and therefore trigger the guided learning and problem-solving processes (Lalande, 1982). The evidence suggests possible feedback approach that could be employed by L2 writing teachers (i.e. varying feedback approaches for treatable and untreatable error types, and providing primarily indirect feedback for treatable errors).

Ferris’s study thus provides valuable insights into the effects of error feedback on L2 writers’ texts. However, as I read Ferris’s analysis and discussion of the data, I found myself unsatisfactory in a way I often am when I read feedback research pieces that are non-contextual. I hence doubt whether this article would be useful for our discussion in class. I think that there are at least two contextual factors that should have been addressed more clearly by Ferris: individual differences and classroom realities. First, by highlighting the fact that 80 percent of the total errors (4,590 out of 5,705 errors) were successfully corrected, Ferris claims a strong relationship between teachers’ feedback and successful student revisions. However, 80 percent of the cases does not say anything about how individual students responded to teacher feedback, given that 92 students participated in the study. In fact, the individual differences became apparent in the result of the quantitative analysis, indicating that the standard deviation of the total errors was extremely large. The same is true of a teacher variable. Ferris investigated three teachers’ marking strategies, and identified that their direct feedback accounted for 45 percent of the total corrections, while their indirect feedback with code accounted for 41 percent of the total. However, this triggers questions about individual teacher differences and consistency in treatment. There might have variation among the three teachers in their proportions of direct and indirect feedback. Second, classroom realities, that is, the relationship between class instruction and teacher feedback is unclear. Given that the study was conducted in an ESL composition classroom and the task was a persuasive essay, it is legitimate to speculate that a focus of the instruction was on writing as well as grammar, but Ferris’s primary concern in this study was put on grammatical accuracy alone. Such research design is skeptical in that the effect of teacher feedback is examined without regard to what was really taught in class. The issue of context that has been overlooked in research into feedback has been pointed out and discussed in class, and thus I do not think this article would serve as a topic for more productive and constructive discussion in class. My evaluation of this article is therefore “not recommended.”

References
Lalande, J. F. II (1982). Reducing composition errors: An experiment. The Modern Language Journal, 66, 140-149.
Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46, 327-369.

Evaluation of Sheen (2007) by Sang-Ki (2nd evaluation assignment)

2007-08-30T21:21:00.000-10:00

Sheen, Y. (2007). The effect of focused written corrective feedback and language aptitude on ESL learners’ acquisition of articles. TESOL Quarterly, 41, 255-283.

What are the purposes of giving feedback on learner errors? This is surely an important question to be addressed when evaluating studies on error feedback. I understand that the purposes can vary substantially depending on the language mode, that is, whether the feedback is given orally or given in a written format. This is because written feedback could demand less cognitive load for learner memory than oral feedback, since feedback given in a written format will be available for a longer period of time than the other type of feedback. Thus, by giving written feedback, teachers may expect their students to benefit more not only in terms of the depth of its effectiveness, but they also expect that the benefit would reach wider contexts of language use.

Most of the oral feedback studies to date have focused on the correction of form-related errors, with an (exclusive) aim of improving the accuracy of a focused linguistic element (e.g., Doughty & Varela, 1998; Iwashita, 2003; Long, Inagaki, & Ortega, 1998; Mackey & Philp, 1998). Conversely, written feedback studies have usually had varied foci other than the improvement of accuracy in student writings; they have also intended to improve writing content, organization, and the overall quality and fluency of writing products. This difference in purposes may account for why “in contrast to the SLA research that in general has shown that oral CF [corrective feedback] is effective, L2 writing researchers have not been able to convincingly demonstrate that written CF leads to improvement in grammatical accuracy in new pieces of writing” (p. 257).

The researcher’s main question in the current study is whether written feedback, if given in a focused manner, improves the accuracy in writing. In order to employ the focused type of feedback by design, teacher written feedback was given only on the article-related errors (i.e., inappropriate uses of a and the) as target to be acquired by the 91 adult intermediate-level research participants. The two factors presumed by Sheen to affect the efficiency of written feedback were (1) two types of written feedback: direct-only correction (provisions of corrected forms) versus direct metalinguistic correction (provisions of corrected forms and metalinguistic comments) and (2) individual differences in language-analytic ability. The patterns of major findings turned out to be predictable. The focused, metalinguistic feedback was found more beneficial for accuracy improvement, and the positive effects appeared to last over a month. In addition, significant benefits from the higher levels of language-analytic ability were found, and the benefits were most prominent within the direct metalinguistic correction condition. The helpful role of metalinguistic information in grammar learning would be in line with what has generally been found from the accumulated oral feedback studies (e.g., Bitchener, Young, & Cameron, 2005; Carroll & Swain, 1993; Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006).

I enjoyed reading this article, and I think this article is useful for a couple of reasons at least. First, this study is the first to my knowledge which looks into the effectiveness of written feedback on accuracy improvement in student writings, with methodologically sound designs (e.g., true control group design with a focused target rule, and the like). Second, this study rightfully switches our attention to the mediating roles of individual differences in grammar learning through written feedback (i.e., individual differences in language-analytic ability). An improvement of the study design could be made, however, if the individual difference factor could serve as an independent variable. (The current study examines only the correlations between language-analytic scores and acquisition scores.) That is, having different independent groups with differential language-analytic abilities and giving them various types of written feedback could shed more light on the potential causal role of the individual difference variable across different feedback types.

Again, if I have rating scales, I would vote for the “recommended” option.

(Personally, I prefer this article to my previous choice (Sheen, 2006) as our course reading.)

Evaluation of Weissberg (2006): Watanabe, Y.

2007-08-30T09:10:00.000-10:00

Weissberg, R. (2006). Scaffolded feedback: Tutorial conversations with advanced L2 writers. In K. Hyland., & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (pp. 246-265). New York: Cambridge University.

Weissberg (2006) investigated the underlying mechanism of oral tutor feedback to L2 students’ writing in one-on-one writing center sessions. Borrowing socio-cultural framework, he examined linguistic and discourse features of scaffolding specific to writing tutorials. Two NNS graduate students each participated in four one-on-one writing conference sessions. The tutorial conversations were audio recorded and analyzed, utilizing inductive analysis (IA). IA is “an iterative process consisting of repeated cycles of data analysis and hypothesis revision” (Weissberg, 2006, p. 252). In other words, themes and discourse categories, and their underlying structures are identified and revised through repetitive reading of the transcripts.

Weissberg found three levels of categories in writing tutorial discourse: a surface discourse level (i.e., overt conversation moves which structure scaffolding: confirmation checks, information questions, etc.), semantic content level (i.e., topical episodes: grammar, citations, writing process, etc.), and pragmatic level (i.e., the goals of the tutoring session: identification of problem areas, evaluation, reflection, etc.). It was concluded that the most salient components of scaffolding were (a) the tutor’s “lexical, ideational, and affective” (p. 259) attachment to tutee’s discourse, and (b) the utilization of conversational linkages (e.g., acknowledgement) to create instructional point.

Weissberg’s study was unique in that he was concerned on the role of oral feedback on global issues of writing, such as “planning, organizing, [and] revising” (p. 252). The study focus was on the nature of interaction during tutoring, and it is unfortunate that it did not further investigate how scaffolded feedback led to advancement in learners’ writing. However, Weissberg’s list of writing tutorial discourse categories (see Table 13.1, p. 254) will be useful for those who plan to investigate such question.

Although I did enjoy the article because I am particularly interested in oral feedback on writing, I do not recommend reading this article in class. It would be a great article for our classmates to take a look as a reference, since the focus of the class is on the effect of feedback.

Evaluation of McDonough & Mackey (2006) by Sorin

2007-08-30T02:11:00.000-10:00

McDonough, K. & Mackey, A. (2006). Responses to recasts: repetitions, primed production, and linguistic development. Language Learning, 56, 693-720.

This study examined one of the most oft-mentioned issues of recasts, whether recasts facilitate L2 development, by investigating the relationships among recasts, different responses to recasts, and L2 development. The researchers distinguished simple repetitions of a recast from primed production and compared their effects on the development of English question. Primed production was defined as a learner’s new utterance using the syntactic structure provided in the recast either immediately or a few turns later (in this paper, within six turns). In a pre- and posttest design, 58 Thai EFL university students performed a series of communicative tasks with NS interlocutors (during three treatment sessions) and completed four tests (one pretest and three posttests) over a 9-week period. L2 development was operationalized in this study as the production of higher level questions on all three posttests according to Pienemann’s developmental sequence. The results indicated that recasts and primed production were predictive of ESL question development whereas mere repetition of recasts was not significantly correlated with ESL question development.

I found this article worth reading since it was among the few studies investigating the relationships among recasts, responses, and L2 development, and showed relatively long-term effects (9-week period) of recasts. It also provided evidence that merely repeating recasts was not necessarily associated with development, and it was more beneficial to produce the form in one’s own way. The findings that learners without immediate responses to recasts were able to successfully formulate advanced questions later on supported delayed effects of recasts on L2 development, thus indicating that the absence of learner responses to recasts, which was often criticized, does not necessarily limit the effectiveness of recasts. Another interesting result of the study was that most of the learners in the control group, which did not receive any feedback, did not produce primed production involving advanced-level questions, even though their NS interlocutor’s use of the targeted form created opportunities for it, which requires further investigation.

This study would be useful to those who are interested in the effectiveness of recasts including its impact on language development, long-term (and/or delayed) effects of recasts, different types of responses to recasts, and their effects on L2 acquisition. The brief summaries of previous studies, addressing various issues regarding the effectiveness of recasts, would be helpful resources for those conducing research on these issues. Thus, I would like to recommend this article to be included in the reading packet.

2007-08-30T00:15:00.000-10:00

Evaluation of Gaskell & Cobb (2004) by Myong Hee

Gaskell, D., & Cobb, T. (2004). Can learners use concordance feedback for writing errors? System, 32, 301-319.

This article demonstrates whether L2 learners can use concordance feedback to correct their sentence-level writing errors. Twenty adult low intermediate Chinese EFL learners in Canada participated in the present study. Each student provided a 200-word writing sample and 10 prominent errors among the samples were determined for concordance feedback. Over a 15 week semester, students handed in 10 assignments. For the teacher’s feedback, a maximum of 5 concordanced errors (hyperlinks) were given for each assignment. The findings show that (1) over 50% of the participants responded that their ability to use grammar points had improved; (2) the vast majority reported that they used concordances to correct their errors; (3) and many of them, especially seven became persistent users of the online concordance.

I felt this article very useful. It shows another way to provide feedback for students’ writings. I have learned that online concordance can be a useful tool for not only teaching vocabulary but also teaching grammatical points. Once you train your students, they can be independent users of concordance who can correct their sentence-level grammatical errors. The ultimate goal of teaching L2 writing is to make a learner an independent proficient writer. Besides, given the fact that most English courses in Korea (probably other Asian countries) are relatively big, learners’ autonomy in L2 writing is highly desirable. In this respect, this article provides good information on learner autonomy in sentence-level error correction.

I really enjoyed reading this study. It is rather a short article and easy to read. The findings interested me a lot as a teacher because they provide valuable information for future writing teachers and researchers.

I’d like to recommend this article to our 750 reading packet. This study suggests another perspective on written feedback. Most studies in written feedback are concerned about teachers’ giving comments on students’ writings. However, this article suggests another possibility that students correct their own sentence-level errors through being a concordance user.

Evaluation of Guenette (2007) by Dan

2007-08-29T23:39:00.000-10:00

Guenette, D. (2007). Is feedback pedagogically correct? Research design issues in studies of feedback on writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16, 40-53.

Rather than trying to interpret the conflicting results of research on feedback in L2 writing (form) as a demonstration of effectiveness or ineffectiveness, Guenette argues that such disparate results to date (which has failed to guide teachers in their practice) may be highly attributable to research design and methodology, as well as the "constellation of variables" that have been ignored. For example, in scrutinizing the research methodology, she points out that efficacy of feedback may be attributable to proficiency levels, which is a variable that is rarely measured and reported accurately. Also, while there is already a deficit in the amount of research that uses both a control group and experimental group, those few that do usually fail to keep all other variables consistent. Another design feature she raises attention to is the "elicitation task" (which I think refers to 'demand'--what do the students have to do with the feedback?). Some of the variables that teachers usually ignore include classroom contexts (is the control group and experimental group receiving the same instruction? Does their instruction place attention to focus on form?), student incentive (are students being graded on the way they react to the feedback?), and motivation, which is also usually overlooked. The article concludes by summarizing the benefits of descriptive studies, which reveal other dimensions of feedback: students' ability to engage with feedback, the type of errors that benefit from feedback, students' perceptions and preferences, and individual differences.

This study can be useful for researchers to fine-tune our research design and methodology so that our research can begin to become more comparable and meaningful; clearly something that is not really happening. We need to be more vigorous in our search for other variables that might affect studies, and this article serves as a good reminder for how to improve our research. I enjoyed the study because it's my area of interest and was vaguely familiar with many of the studies that were only briely referred to. So I'd recommend it as a reading....but maybe only if you're involved in research on feedback in L2 writing with a focus on form.

A study that I spotted in this article that seems particularly interesting to me was:
Han, Z. H. (2001). Fine-tuning corrective feedback. Foreign Language Annals, 34, 582-595. This is a longitudinal case study that reveals individual differences are an important factor in determining whether feedback is effective or not, and calls for fine-tuning the feedback to the learners' specific problems.

Evaluation of Loewen and Philip (2006) By Ping

2007-08-29T22:55:00.000-10:00

Loewen, S., & Philip, J. (2006). Recasts in the adult L2 classroom: Characteristics, explicitness and effectiveness. Modern Language Journal, 90, 536-556.

This study examined the provision, the nature, and the effectiveness of recasts in 12 adult ESL classrooms. The findings indicated that recasts were widely used and were beneficial at least 50 % of the time. Although other forms of feedback had similar success rate measured by posttests, recasts differed in the connection between learner response and test performance. The study suggests that recasts vary widely in terms of stress, intonation, number of feedback moves, length of recasts, and degree of explicitness. These characteristics of recasts are likely to affect their effectiveness in classroom context. More specifically, it points out that stress, declarative intonation, and number of feedback moves can be associated with the effectiveness of recasts since these elemens increase the salience of recasts and therefore learners respond to them as explicit corrections. The study also suggests that other factors, such as degree of differences between the learner's utterance and the recast and the nature of discourse in which recasts are provided, should be taken into account.

I think this article brings up an important issue we talked about in previous session: the degree of explicitness of negative feedback. It investigates the differences within recasts and considers the impact of their characteristics on their effectiveness, instead of classifying them as one generic type of implicit negative feedback. Also, it highlights the importance to not only look at learners' immediate uptake, but also consider the overall interactional organization of the discourse. Using learners' immediate response to feedback might not be adequate to assess the effectiveness of recasts. For example, multiple feedback moves can contribute to further learner engagement and higher learner production, therefore serving as predictor of successful uptake.

If you are interested in variable elements of recasts and the complexities of their characteristics, this will be a good read. It has a comprehensive discussion on different perspectives regarding the benefits and limitations of recasts. I think it's a good introduction to those who are not familiar with recast studies. Even though I got confused with its coding categories, overall, I will recommend it to be added to the 750 reading packet.

Evaluation of Loewen and Erlam (2006) by BoSun Choi

2007-08-29T21:42:00.000-10:00

Loewen and Erlam (2006). Corrective Feedback in the Chatroom: An experimental study Shawn. Computer Assisted Language Learning , 19, 1-14

This quasi-experimental study tried to investigate the effectiveness of the two types of corrective feedback, i.e., recasts (implicit) vs. meta-linguistic information (implicit) on in online chatting with 31 beginning L2 learners of English. The target structure is regular past tense (verb+ed), which is known as a morpheme acquired later in morphemes studies (see Dulay and Burt, 1974). After taking pretest, the participants went through 56 minutes of corrective feed session (treatment), where they received either type of corrective feedback while completing the two tasks; story retelling after seeing a picture with written narratives and verbal description of the pictures. Their learning is measured by timed and untimed grammaticality judgment test (GJT) immediately and two weeks later. ANOVA analysis displayed insignificant difference for the two corrective feedback types and for time, meaning that the two groups there is no significant gains in response to either feedback type nor was there significant gain over time.

Reading this article is somewhat useful in a sense that it gives some insight into differences between face-to-face and online study. The suggestion of three features of online chatting is acceptable to explain insignificant amount of uptake as follows; 1) reduced immediacy of the feedback due to the overlap between interlocutor turns 2) the lack /reduced incidence of uptake in response to feedback. 3) students’ frequent going off the target and instructor’s less control over the off-topic. However, such suggestion is a bit mitigated when the author mentions that the participants’ low proficiency level may lead to insignificant amount of uptake. If the participants were not ready to learn the target form their proficiency level would serve as a conclusive factor. Even though the picture is puzzling, the characteristics of online chatting suggested in this study would give some ideas for further studies about corrective errors in online setting, which may be beneficial those who are interested in CALL and error correction.

I personally enjoyed reading it since the research gave me some insights about the characteristics of online feedback. It would be more enjoyable, however, if this study provided more sound explanation about the design. First, it did not explicitly explain why it adopted timed and untimed GJT for measurement different from the one in Ellis et al.’s(2006) study, by which this research is motivated for replication. Even though the design of this study is not new but directly employed from classroom research, this article may be enjoyable for this class in a sense that it describes some characteristics of online classroom setting, which greatly differs from off-line class. Especially, the instructor’s low level of control over student’s utterance seems to be interesting factor in response to its effect on learning since CALL literature pointed out that student centeredness is one of the important benefit of the online instruction.

I would like to recommend this article for the class since there has been scarce literature about the effect of online feedback in SLA literature. Despite of the result that there was no significant effect for either online corrective feedback, it is worth reading the description of the characteristics of online chatting. Given students’ growing need for application of technology to language classrooms, it would be worth further studying the effect of using different tool in language classroom.

Evaluation of Ellis and Sheen (2006) by Kevin

2007-08-29T19:34:00.000-10:00

Ellis and Sheen (2006) Reexamining the Role of Recasts in Second Language Acquisition. SSLA, 28, 575-600

This article assesses the current state of research concerning recasts. The authors identify and suggest solutions for several types of problems that have occurred in many studies to date. Specifically, they are argue that there are a variety of recast forms and functions and these are often not taken into account; the type of corrective strategy being studied, that is (implicit or explicit/negative or positive) is often unclear; social and sociocognitive perspectives are often not considered or factored into results; the significance of learner repair following recasts has not been examined in enough detail; developmental readiness should be investigated more thoroughly as a factor in acquisition by recast; other corrective strategies (such as elicitation, clarification requests, translation, metalinguistic feedback) have not received as much attention as recasts in the research literature.

One important issue that the article brings up is the question of classifying recasts. I think many of us tend to use the word recast to cover a huge group of varied corrective feedback. Should we classify types of recasts and treat them as separate types of one phenomenon for research purposes? The authors mention several types of recasts including repetition, reformulation, corrective and non-corrective, full or partial, single or multiple, simple complex and context-dependant. Clearly, the types of recasts listed above are not all equally effective and researchers should be aware of these distinctions when planning research. In addition to types of recasts, other factors also complicate the definition of a recast. Feedback can be in the form of addition, deletion, substitution or reordering. The student/teacher orientation must be taken into account in terms of whether the language is being treated as an object or for message conveyance; Is the recast didactically or communicatively motivated? The authors suggest the possibility of classifying in relation to effects recasts have on acquisition or successful uptake.

Another question that has been addressed, but not adequately, according to the researchers, is whether or not recasts are implicit or explicit forms of feedback. The authors state that it often depends on the linguistic or discourse context and that researchers should be more aware of this fact. Another interesting and related question is whether or not recasts result in metalinguistic awareness or an internalization of rules without being consciously aware of a rule or pattern. The research up to this point does not give a clear picture. Are implicit recasts noticed as being corrections or something else? The larger question posed here concerns the relationship between noticing and recasts. To what degree are the different types of recasts noticed? Is noticing a factor in acquisition by recasts? Added to this are the roles of positive and negative evidence and the further complicating effect that they have on the type of recast being used. The authors state tentatively that positive evidence arises naturally and may or may not be noticed and acquired and negative evidence is explicit feedback. The recast itself could be both, depending on the learner interpretation and the discourse context.

Having established that recasts come in many sizes shapes and forms, the authors address the most important question of all; Do recasts facilitate acquisition? That is, should we even bother?
The research to date shows that there is certainly potential, especially if the recast focuses on a single feature or is emphasized in some way. The research is inconclusive. A numbers of factors seem to contribute to the effectiveness of recasts for facilitating acquisition. The literacy or proficiency as well as the learner’s orientation may also affect recast effectiveness and should be taken into account when deciding on a recast strategy. Individual learner differences, type of recast, target of the recast, developmental readiness of the learner also appear to be part of the picture, but to what extent is not know at this point. Several questions remain; Is uptake and repair dependant on instructional and social context? . Is noticing present only if uptake and repair is present? Does subsequent usage of correct forms contribute to acquisition?

A lot of ideas are covered in this article, each one worthy of a long discussion. It may help to summarize some of the main ideas. This is done below:

1. Recasts come in a variety of forms and should not be treated as homogeneous
2. Recasts can be functionally different and this may affect acquisition.
3. Recast can be considered explicit as well as implicit feedback
4. Learner orientation is a factor in deciding if recasts can be considered positive or negative feedback.
5. Learners may not recognize corrective force of recasts
6. Socio-psychological factors, individual learner differences, target language and developmental readiness may determine receptiveness
7. The role of uptake is uncertain
8. Research tends to focus on focused recasts. These results cannot be applied to classroom situations where recasts are extensive.
9. No clear evidence that recasts work better for acquisition than other forms of interaction.

In terms of our previous discussion about effectiveness, the authors define an effective recast as one that facilitates acquisition. I recommend this article for inclusion in the reading packet.

Evaluation of Sachs & Polio (2007) by Hung-Tzu

2007-08-29T16:50:00.000-10:00

Sachs, R., & Polio, C. (2007). Learners’ uses of two types of written feedback on a L2 writing revision task. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29, 67-100.

Reformulation refers to a native speaker's rewriting of an L2 learner's written composition in order to make the language seem more nativelike, while keeping the content of the original intact (Thornbury, 1997). Through three-stage composition-comparison-revision tasks, Sachs and Polio’s study (2007) examined first, the effectiveness of reformulations versus written error corrections; second, the relationship between higher quality noticing and revision outcome; and third, whether think aloud while comparing reformulated writings make a difference in linguistic accuracy of learner revision.

Fifteen adult learners of English participated in a repeated measure study with three experimental conditions: error correction, reformulation, and reformulation + think-aloud condition. Though this first experiment suggested that noticing of feedback was related to accuracy of subsequent revision, the error correction group outperformed the reformulation group probably because the error correction group had more time to memorize corrected forms. A second experiment was carried out to in attempt to eliminate the time variable. The nonrepeated measure design with 54 learners found similar results that reformulation did not prove to be more helpful than error corrections. Also, learners who were in the reformulation group outperformed their counterparts in the reformulation + think aloud group. Sachs and Polio suggested that while verbal protocols gave insights on learner-internal process in relation to written feedback, results on the effectiveness should be interpreted with care.

I do not think this article is the best option to be included in our course reading mainly because I doubt the feasibility of using reformulation as a feedback technique in writing courses. The problem lies not only in the time and effort required from the teachers to rewrite every student's composition but also the possibility that such technique could greatly endanger learners' ownership in writing. The study did not include any discussion on such concerns. In explaining the process of reformulation, the researchers indicated that grammatical errors, style, cohesion, and vocabulary were all part of the correction. This to me, is a very vague description on just how much rewriting was done.

While I feel that reformulation might not be the most practical written feedback in writing classrooms, I did enjoy the discussion on think-aloud as a measure of noticing. The researchers pointed out the difficulties in coding and determining awareness in metalinguistic verbalizations and also discussed the complex relationship between noticing during think aloud, accuracy in revision, and long-term acquisition.

The study might be useful for those considering using think-aloud as an effectiveness measure, but overall, my evaluation to the article is not recommended.

2007-08-29T10:38:00.000-10:00

Evaluation of Ammar and Spada (2006)’ article by Yun Deok Choi

Ammar, A., & Spada, N. (2006). One size fits all? : Recasts, prompts, and L2 learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 543-574.

Based on the previous research findings that corrective feedback (CF) is facilitative for L2 learning, this quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of CF and that of recasts and prompts, respectively, in conjunction with learner proficiency level. Sixty-four francophone students from an intensive ESL program were assigned into a recast, prompt, and control group. The target feature was third-person singular possessive determiners (PDs), namely, his and her, which are known to be difficult for French speaking ESL learners. As for treatment, instructional intervention was implemented, and it consisted of 1 instruction on PDs and 11 practice sessions. Learners’ knowledge of the target feature was measured by pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest that were composed of a passage correction and an oral picture description task. The researchers discovered the followings: utilizing CF during communicative activities was more beneficial for learners than without using it, prompts were more facilitative than recasts for learners with low proficiency, the two CF techniques were more helpful than no CF for learners with low proficiency, prompts were more beneficial than recasts for learners with low proficiency, and learners with high proficiency were able to get equal benefit from both CF techniques. The researchers explained the better efficiency of prompts by addressing their explicitness and numerous opportunities to uptake they provide.

It will be very helpful for my classmates to read this article because it provides concisely summarized information about the previous studies on the effectiveness of corrective feedback on L2 development. That is, if you read it, you will easily understand the core aspects of prior studies in relation to the current topic since it deals with the previous experimental studies as well as descriptive studies related to the topic in depth. In addition, it also offers sufficient details with respect to every section, so you can readily comprehend not only the whole experimental situation but also the subsequent results and explanations for them.

I personally enjoy reading this article very much since I am interested in both the effectiveness of corrective feedback like recasts and prompts in classroom settings and learner proficiency level, which is the topic of the article. In addition, it was written in a very well-organized manner with plenty of detailed explanations. For example, at the end of the article, the researchers posed limitations of the current research that we have to keep in mind when we estimate the research and they also suggested some interesting areas to be dealt with in the future study. This information helps readers to comprehend the whole story more completely. Therefore, I strongly recommend that we should add it to our reading packet.

Evaluation of Tocalli-Beller & Swain (2005) by Sachiko

2007-08-28T13:34:00.001-10:00

Tocalli-Beller, A., & Swain, M. (2005). Reformulation: The cognitive conflict and L2 learning it generates. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 15(1), 5-28.

This paper provides qualitative and quantitative evidence of the role that cognitive conflict plays in the process of learning a second language. Twelve grade 7 French immersion students participated in a multi-stage task: (1) writing a descriptive essay and getting back the essay reformulated by a native speaker of French, (2) noticing the changes, (3) stimulated recall that requires students to discuss the reformulation, (4) post-test, (5) interview that aims to investigate students’ learning experience. The qualitative data revealed that the reformulation of the writing became an effective technique for stimulating noticing and reflection/discussion about the language students used. The students did not always agree with the authority’s reformulation but questioned and disagreed with the reformulation. The cognitive conflict thus promoted discussions on their beliefs and theories of how language works, and as they did so, students constructed new knowledge. This was evidenced by the quantitative data, indicating that the majority of correct answers in the post-test came from cognitive conflict episodes in which students questioned and discussed the alternative provided in the reformulation. The authors conclude that the reformulation which brings about a cognitive conflict can enhance language learning, citing Vygotsky’s remark: “Great genius is formed with the help of another genius not so much by assimilation as through friction” (Vygostky, 1999, p.273, as cited in Tocalli-Beller & Swain, 2005, p.21).

It is interesting that the authors view reformulation as a source of cognitive conflict, and that they employ sociocultural theory to explore the role of cognitive conflict in the process of learning a second language. These theoretical underpinnings allow the authors to provide insight into how the reformulation was processed and understood by students in relation to social factors, such as interactions with peers and more knowledgeable person’s help. The cognitive and sociocultural approaches to the study probably constitute what makes this study distinct from other error correction research in the field of L2 writing, where discussion has focused largely on texts. The study showed that the reformulation provided by the authority (a native speaker of French) gave students an opportunity to notice a gap and advance their understanding of the target language by not only producing talk but also by causing them to reflect on the language production itself. Semiotic mediation (Wertsch & Stone, 1985) though explaining, questioning, and disagreeing thus played an important role in reconstructing and/or acquiring new knowledge. The combination of cognitive (how students understood teachers’ correction, and how they re-examined their own language use) and social (how interaction enhanced students’ discussion and reflection about their language use) factors would warrant further investigation in order to learn the effect of error correction on L2 writers’ development, and will therefore be useful for our discussion.

While this study provides a number of important implications about L2 learners’ use of error correction, some questions seem to remain unanswered or only partially addressed. The data showed that while some students who faced cognitive conflict got the answer correct in the post-test, others still reiterated the incorrect answer and appropriated the rule that was wrong. This was because they were not sure of the reasons for their errors, and did not understand why the change had been made by the authority. The students’ appropriation of the wrong rule seems to come from the research design where the person who reformulated students’ texts was instructed not to answer questions that arose during the discussion with the students. It seems that these students would need more explicit instruction and explanation about the reformulation. A question arises here: Would just reflecting and discussing the reformulation really enhance language learning even if learners are not given explicit explanation about the reasons for their errors? My stance is that if learners do not have the necessary knowledge to produce the correct form, that knowledge must be added to their knowledge bank, and if internalization of the necessary knowledge is insufficient, further internalization is necessary, as Tsutsui (2004) pointed out. This would probably serve as a discussion topic in the class. Further, the authors argue that the reformulation promoted the improvement of students’ language use, yet whether students’ short-term ability to correct their errors would translate into long-term improvement remains questionable. How a post-test needs to be designed to investigate the students’ long-term writing development would be an interesting topic for classroom discussion. Overall, I recommend that this article be added to the reading packet.

References

Tsutsui, M. (2004). Multimedia as a means to enhance feedback. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 17, 377-402.

Wertsch, J .V. & Stone, C. A. (1985). The concept of internalization in Vygotsky’s account of the genesis of higher mental functions. In J.V. Wertsch (Ed.), Culture, communication and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives (pp. 162-179). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Evaluation of Sheen (2006) by Sang-Ki

2007-08-27T22:03:00.000-10:00

Sheen, Y. (2006). Exploring the relationship between characteristics of recasts and learner uptake. Language Teaching Research, 10, 361-392.

The study design and the main findings of Sheen (2006) are on the extension of other pioneering research on the descriptions of classroom interactions, where a special emphasis is laid on the role of recasts in learner uptake (e.g., Lyster 1998; Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Mori, 2002). The most conspicuous point that would make this classroom observation study unique is that the researcher investigates the differential effects of types of recasts on learner uptake (and also on learner repair), by introducing the variable of “explicitness” to the extant literature on recasts in SLA. She argues that the previous understanding that recasts are implicit in nature should be reevaluated (see Long & Robinson’s (1998) definition), because recasts could exist on an implicit-explicit continuum. She argues further that explicit recasts, which are supposedly related to the psycholinguistic construct of “saliency,” would also be more beneficial for learner uptake and therefore have a potential benefit for subsequent acquisition. In this study a combination of such features as the length of recasts, the linguistic focus, the type of change, and others are thought to contribute to the extent to which recasts are explicit.

This study may be useful for our discussion in that it provides an extensive list of coding categories that would be employed in our future work. The coding schemes may leave room for scrutiny, however, and the examination into the schemes to find some necessary modifications would be a meaningful classroom exercise. Another merit of this study is its high readability. It is written in relatively simple language, having a logical thought flow in it.

Some issues remain open for further inquiry. One of the fundamental messages from the researcher is that the previous definitions of recasts, which tend to place an undue emphasis on the implicit nature of recasts, are questionable and should be reconsidered. However, I do not completely agree that the previous definitions (and actual research practices to date) do not recognize the potential for recasts to be more explicit. Rather, previous researchers have already suggested a possibility that there could be the explicit-implicit dimension of recasts (see Doughty & Varela, 1998). Additionally, the degree of explicitness is relative, and however explicit the recasts are, they will be relatively less explicit than other types of feedback, such as explicit correction with metalinguistic information. Another point that should be mentioned here is that the explicitness/implicitness of recasts was not a variable to be directly investigated by design, but was a corollary from in-depth analyses into the descriptive data obtained.

All in all, this article is very easy to read, interesting, and resourceful for further thinking as well as future research. If I have rating scales such as “highly recommended,” “recommended,” and “not recommended,” I would put my mark on the “recommended” option.

Learning and thinking more about wikis...

2007-08-22T11:38:00.000-10:00

If anyone in the class wants to learn more about wikis, you can find some good reading here or here.

My problems with Blogger were due to my browser (Netscape), maybe Yuki's were too? Now that I am using Mozilla Firefox, I can login fine again.

Yuki: The message you were trying to post yesterday is saved in draft form. You can try and see if you can post it now.

Structuring "Error Correction Wiki" page

2007-08-21T14:22:00.000-10:00

Hi, class :) This is going to be an exciting class!
I thought it might be nice to start thinking about the structure of the Wiki page a bit before we start building up the page. Wiki is pretty flexible, so we can, of course, modify the structure later on. If you have any suggestions, let us know!

I read Russell and Spada's (2006) meta-analysis on corrective feedback before, and I thought it might be helpful to list some of the variables that are studied in the past. Here are some of the variables they list (I also added some variables from today's class):

Feedback (FB) characteristics:
- Type of FB
- Amount/intensiveness of FB
- Mode of FB
- Mode of error
- Source of FB
- Focus of FB
- Timing of FB

Learner variables:
- Proficiency level
- Attitudes towards FB
- Aptitude
- Motivation
- Anxiety
- Age
- Noticing & interpretation of FB

Study characteristics
- Design (experimental, quasi-experimental, etc.)
- Context (classroom, laboratory)
- Unit of analysis (individual, dyad, language event)

*Note: Russell & Spada (2006) is a good article to read at the beginning of the semester for this course, I think.

Please feel free to add any other variables you can think of.

Welcome to SLS 750 message

2007-08-20T17:24:00.000-10:00

Welcome to the Error Correction Seminar this fall 2007

I have created this class blog to enable us to communicate and interact about the topic of error correction. I will also ask you to post some of the assignments for the seminar in this class blog.

I look forward to a productive semester.