Oral corrective feedbackIts effects on the acquisition of english, teaching practices and teachers' and students' beliefs

Resumo

This doctoral thesis aims to contribute to the growing body of research which shows that oral corrective feedback or error correction is beneficial for second language acquisition. It also seeks to address the pedagogical question of how oral feedback can be implemented in communicative language classrooms. With these aims in mind, a series of three empirical studies was designed based on a review of the existing literature on oral corrective feedback. First of all, a quasi-experimental classroom study was carried out to compare the effects of two types of feedback on the accurate oral production and acquisition of the English regular and irregular past simple tense. Two intact classes of intermediate learners at a Spanish university carried out communicative storytelling tasks during which they received either elicitation or metalinguistic feedback on their past tense errors. Both types of feedback were found to impact the acquisition of the target structure positively, but there were some indications that metalinguistic feedback could be more helpful for the immediate repair of students� errors and could also be more effective for the acquisition of the target structure. Moreover, metalinguistic feedback was found to have larger effects than elicitation on the acquisition of the irregular past tense. This study also indicates that oral corrective feedback, even in an explicit form, can be combined successfully with a communicative focus, since the students responded favourably to the treatment and stated that their confidence and fluency had grown. A second empirical study investigated the feedback practices of 10 adult EFL teachers and compared these to their stated beliefs about error correction, elicited by means of an openended questionnaire. It was found that the most frequently used way of correcting was recasting or reformulating the student�s utterance, which confirms results from previous observational studies. The teachers stated they felt feedback was important, but at the same time they expressed a concern for the promotion of fluency and confidence. It also appears that most teachers are not fully aware of how they correct their students� spoken errors. Finally, a larger number of teachers and students from an adult EFL and a secondary school context took part in a survey-study which elicited their attitudes to oral corrective feedback. Previous findings that students tend to ask for much more feedback than their teachers believe to be necessary were confirmed in this study. Moreover, the teachers and students also disagreed about the best way of correcting, since the students showed a preference for more explicit types while the teachers were not convinced of the effectiveness of these techniques. Finally, teachers� preoccupation with possible negative affective reactions to corrective feedback do not appear to be justified based on the results of this survey-study, since the majority of both adult and teenage students stated they rarely or never experience feelings such as embarrassment or inhibition as a result of being corrected when they speak. In conclusion, based on these results it appears that teachers should not be afraid to use more explicit types of feedback, since (1) these were found to be beneficial for the accurate production and acquisition of certain grammatical structures, (2) they seem to be compatible with a communicative focus and (3) they tend to be preferred by students.