Feedback and teaching vocabulary -translating academic research findings into classroom practice

Alice GruberInternational School Stuttgart

Aim of this session:

- Discuss findings about written and spoken feedback- Analyse different types of feedback - Share your practice- Discuss vocabulary teaching

Error Correction (Corrective Feedback - CF)

Issues:• which errors• how many errors• how to correct • when to correct (for spoken feedback)

Feedback can influence self-efficacy

Self-efficacy: people’s perceptions of their ability to perform well on a given task.

• more easily destroyed by negative feedback than restored by positive feedback.

• twice as much positive feedback as negative feedback (e.g. Voerman et al 2012).

• Students are good at recognising formulaic positive comments (Hyland and Hyland 2001).

• Language aptitude, learning style, anxiety, and

attitudes (Conrad & Goldstein, 1999; Sheen, 2011)• Learners’ beliefs influence:whether or not they retain feedback (Storch &Wigglesworth, 2010)• whether they prefer content overgrammar feedback (Hyland, 2011)

• Feedback perceived as demotivating: unlikely to attend feedback

• Beginners: easily overwhelmed (Bitchener and Ferris 2011)

• Comments should be specific rather than formulaic (Hyland and Hyland 2001)

Written corrective feedback

Students: expect and value teacher feedback (e.g., Eginarlar,

1993; Ferris, 1995;) and prefer the more explicit option.

expect their teachers to point out and correct their errors.

tend to believe that they cannot possibly correct their own errors without that specific information.

Students: feel that teachers should focus their feedback on local issues (such as grammar and mechanics)

Direct and indirect feedback

Direct WCF: when the teacher provides the correct form

• e.g. crossing out of an unnecessary word, the insertion of a missing word, and the provision of the correct form or structure

Reasons for giving direct feedback• clear information to help them resolve more complex

errors (for example, syntactic structure)• may be appropriate for some error types (e.g. idiomatic

lexical issues such as prepositions)

• Disadvantages?

• In advanced proficiency classroom settings:direct error correction plus oral meta-linguistic explanation (5 minute one-on-one conferences) (Bitchener, Young and Cameron 2005)

• Ferris (2010) questions the practicality of this

• an instructional emphasis on written errors may neglect other aspects of writing, such as ideas, organization and processes.

Indirect WCF

Indirect feedback

Pointing out errors but without correcting (e.g. underlining or circling an error).

• Lalande (1982) argued that indirect CF is preferable because it requires reflection and problem-solving, leading to more long-term growth in writing/self-monitoring ability.

• for lower proficiency writers in language learning classes, indirect feedback tends to be less preferred because they have a more limited linguistic repertoire to draw on (Bitchener and Knoch 2010).

Written Feedback

• Direct/indirect feedback

• Your thoughts/comments/practice?

Focus and unfocused feedback

focused WCF: teacher targets a small number of specific errors

unfocused WCF: all/most errors are corrected

Potential issues?

students generally prefer unfocused rather than focused correction (Bitchener and Ferris 2011).

Some studies: focused WCF is more valuable than unfocused (Ferris et al 2013).

But: students might underestimate the amount of effort and attention it takes to self-edit an important piece of writing.

Students may be misled by selective error feedback because students may mistakenly think that the rest of their writing is completely right (Lalande 1982)

Constraints regarding feedback

• Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) predicts a predictable order of acquisition in language learning.

e.g. in ESL question formation:

(Pienemann 1998)

• Feedback on a particular grammar point: only useful if the learner is at a stage where they are ready to acquire the feature

• It is unlikely that teachers will be sufficiently familiar with individual learners’ interlanguages (Hashemnezhad 2012)

• consider what the learners expect: will be more likely to engage in the feedback process and be more effective users of the feedback they receive (Bitchener and Ferris 2011)

Written Feedback

• Focused/unfocused feedback

• Your thoughts/comments/practice?focused WCF: teacher targets a small number of specific errors

unfocused WCF: all/most errors are corrected

Oral Feedback

Explicit feedback:Overt error correction (possibly with the provision of a grammatical explanation, metalinguistic information)

(1) L2 learner: My father work every day.(a) No, you should say works, not work.(b) The verb needs to agree with the subject.(c) Father is the subject of the verb. So, you should say, “My father works, instead of my father work.”

• drawbackit is more obtrusive than other types of correction and could disrupt the flow of communication.

• If metalinguistic information is provided:this kind of feedback promotes not only noticing but also understanding, which can lead to deeper learning (Sheen 2010)

Implicit feedback:

• signals incomprehensible language or a misformulation without interrupting the flow of the interaction.

• attempt to clarify meaning and prevent a breakdown in communication.

• Negotiation strategies: confirmation checks, clarification requests and comprehension checks.

NNS: I bought a basen of flowers.NS: a basin? (Confirmation check)NNS: a baseNS: a what? (Clarification request)NNS: a base …. a glass of flowersNS: oh, a vaseNNS: yes, a vase of flowers

Elicitation

Eliciting completion of students’ own utterance by strategically pausing to allow students to fill in the blank

No, not that. It‘s a . . .. How do we say X in French?students are asked to reformulate their utterance (Faqeih 2012)

Opportunities for self-repair, promoting and automatizing the retrieval of the forms learners are familiar with

Opportunity for hypothesis testing: may have a facilitative effect for foreign language development (Nassaji 2009).

Your thoughts/comments/practice regarding these types of feedback

explicit and implicit feedbackelicitation

RecastsRecasts are “utterances that repeat a learner’s incorrect utterance, making only the changes necessary to produce a correct utterance, without changing the meaning” (Nicholas, Lightbown and Spada (2001: 733).

NNS: I don’t know much people here.NS: many people here

recasts are the most common form of error correction employed by language teachers. (Oliver and Mackey (2003), Sheen (2004)) Lyster (1998): recasts are ambiguous to learners because they occur alongside other types of feedback, such as non-corrective repetitions

Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) study showed that nearly 70% of recasts went unnoticed by the students.

efficacy of recasts is constrained by a number of factors, for example:--learners’ proficiency (Panova and Lyster, 2002; Mackey and Philp, 1998), -choice of target form (Carpenter et al., 2006; Kim and Han, 2007),  

• recasts of morphosyntactic errors are less noticeable than recasts of phonological and lexical errors, and longer recasts are less effective than shorter recasts

• In order for recasts to be effective, the focus needs to be on one error and it needs to be clearly signalled as a recast.

Can be an effective form of feedback:they may be an opportunity for learners to modify their output and it may increase the salience of a particular form.

Can raise learners‘ awareness of what they are unable to say in the target language or that there is a difference between their version and the version of the target-language.

Your thoughts/comments/practice regarding recasts

Recast: correct the mistake by repeating a learner’s utterance without the mistakes.

Self-Correction

In general, the advice given to teachers is to try to elicit self-correction from the learner rather than to correct directly (Erlam et al 2013)

Problems with self-correction: • Learners prefer the teacher to do the correction for

them. • Only possible if learners possess the necessary

linguistic knowledge.• Depends on students’ analytical ability and accuracy

What to correct

• The gravity of an error - a matter of personal opinion (Ellis 2009).

• Some teachers were inclined to view all errors as equally serious—“an error is an error.” (Vann, Meyer, and Lorenz (1984))

• Treat those errors which are regularly repeated by one or more students

(Moss 2000) • correct frequent, serious and stigmatising mistakes

(Bitchener and Ferris (2011))• Not been exposed to a language form or are not ready to

learn a particular structure: there is little point in intervening and giving feedback.

Delayed or immediate CF?

• Hedge (2000) noted that teacher guides accompanying course books frequently instruct teachers to leave correction until the end of fluency activities.

• There is no research evidence to show that immediate correction is any more effective than delayed.

Your thoughts/comments/practice regarding delayed/immediate CF and what to correct

Vocabulary learning and teaching

• Krashen (1993) points out, "When students travel, they don't carry grammar books, they carry dictionaries”

• Vocabulary knowledge correlates highly with performance in listening, reading and writing.

• Learning a word involves a receptive-productive continuum: receptive processing (for comprehension) and productive processing (for production)

• active and passive vocabulary

Learning a new word - the chance of a new word being stored in long-term memory

Involvement load hypothesis (Hulstijn and Laufer 2001)

need: depends on whether the word is necessary to complete a given tasksearch: refers to the learner trying to find the meaning of a L2 word, using a dictionary or other sources, for instance teachers or peers.evaluation: decision-making during tasks, for instance a comparison of a given word with other words

• The higher the level of the involvement load, the more effective the task is in promoting vocabulary learning

• For example: flashcards to teach vocabulary versus exploring vocabulary via reading texts

• Introducing vocabulary in lexical sets, i.e. word class sets, does not necessarily facilitate learning.

• A thematic group containing the words sweater, changing room, try on, wool, striped may be more effective than the words scarf, tie, coat, pants and skirt, which are a semantically related set (Erten and Tekin 2008)

• L1 translations: more effective than providing L2-based meanings (Ramachandran and Rahim (2004)

• For relatively experienced L2 learners, L2–L1 word pairs may be more effective than L2-picture pairs (Lotto and de Groot 1998)

• Learning lists of vocabulary with translations is an efficient way to learn the large volumes a language requires (Fitzpatrick, Al-Qarni and Meara 2008)

Your thoughts/comments/practice regarding vocabulary teaching

Summary

- Variables influence feedback uptake (e.g. learners’ beliefs, whether students are ready…..)

- Feedback influences self-efficacy (give twice as much positive feedback)

- Consider what learners expect when giving CF- Recasts: potentially ambiguous – one at a time and clearly signalled.- Active vs. passive vocabulary- Involvement load: need, search, evaluation- Teach different word classes together, in a thematic group

Thank you for listening!

grubera@issev.de

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