“Of all the advantages that BSL [blended synchronous learning] offers for remote students over traditional online courses, the possibility of receiving individual feedback, along with interaction, might be the most relevant for language learning.”
Girons & Swinehart, p. 38
Feedback can take many forms — positive as well as negative, implicit and explicit — but in L2 instruction, it is generally understood to mean “corrective feedback,” i.e., feedback directed at errors in student output, both written and oral.
While the use of corrective feedback in L2 instruction is presumably ubiquitous, its implementation is not at all uniform. Instructors vary widely in their beliefs concerning the efficacy of feedback, how and when it should be administered, and in which instructional contexts it may be appropriate. For many, the preferred approach is the one they themselves experienced as language learners; for others, the approach has evolved over time in response to factors such as experience or research findings.
The move from F2F to remote L2 instruction — and the attendant move from F2F oral feedback and handwritten comments to the affordances of remote formats — has necessitated many changes. For some instructors it may also be an opportunity to re-think their approach in light of recent studies on the topic. This brief review of some recent research is offered in hopes that it may raise questions about what is and isn’t productive, and lead to further exploration of the extensive research literature.
L2 instructors often feel that they spend a significant number of their waking hours giving written feedback to students in the form of corrections to sentences, essays, and tests. There are many different approaches for doing so in a written format:
- crossing out the wrong form or word and supplying the correct form
- providing a code for “word order” or “conjugation” or “adjective ending” and writing that over the phrase or in the margin
- underlining the incorrect part of a word or phrase to indicate that there’s a problem, then letting students determine what it is and how to correct it.
And even more for oral feedback:
- conversational recasts (i.e., repeating the content of the utterance, but correctly, and in a conversational rather than explicitly corrective way)
- explicit recasts
- frowning at a student following an incorrect utterance to indicate an error
- repeating the utterance of a student up to the point of error, followed by an expectant look
- stopping the discourse, saying the incorrect word or phrase (with rising intonation) and looking expectantly at the speaker for a correction
- giving a meta-linguistic response: “You just said ____. That’s okay for talking about the present, but you’re talking about the past. What would the past-tense form be?”
Research beginning in the 1980’s into the efficacy of this or that corrective move tried to identify the effect various kinds of feedback would have on L2 acquisition. But the results were not what researchers and instructors were expecting. In study after study (summarized gleefully by Truscott) researchers found minimal long-term gains from the corrective feedback they were investigating — regardless of whether it was in the form of direct correction, recasts, coded feedback or anything else.
Truscott’s provocative commentary on the findings up through the early 1990’s caused a substantial stir in the field, and researchers began looking more carefully at what was being corrected, how the corrections were provided, and how the investigative data should be analyzed.
A second wave of research, beginning in the early 2000’s, found that certain salient features of learner language do, in fact, respond to corrective feedback — but that a blanket-style approach, i.e., correcting all the errors in an essay, for example, has little long-term advantage over less explicit and less extensive correction.
A frequently-cited study by Ellis et al (2006) found that explicit, metalinguistic feedback for a targeted form (in this case, the English past-tense -ed marker) showed a clear advantage over implicit feedback. (The results are similar to those in an earlier study by Doughty & Varela [1998] that showed positive effects for targeted, explicit feedback on past-tense strong verbs in spoken L2 English.)
And finally: A study by Van Beuningen et al (2012) suggests that instructors should distinguish between grammatical and nongrammatical issues:
“We conclude that both grammatical and nongrammatical errors are amenable to CF [corrective feedback] but that they benefit from different types of corrections: Direct correction [i.e., providing the correct forms] is better suited for grammatical errors and indirect correction [i.e., implicit responses] is better suited for nongrammatical errors.”
Van Beuningen et al, pp. 32-33
All this to say: This may be a good time to consider one's approaches to giving feedback — in both oral and in written formats — and to think about ways of adjusting these for remote L2 teaching.
References & Resources
Bitchener, J. (2008). Evidence in support of written corrective feedback. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17, 102-118.
Doughty, C. and Varela, E. (1998). Communicative focus on form. In Doughty, C. and Williams, J. (eds.) Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, pp. 114-138.
Ellis, R., Loewen, S. and Erlam, R. (2006). Implicit and explicit corrective feedback and the acquisition of L2 grammar. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 339-368.
Girons, A. and Swinehart, N. (2020). Teaching Languages in Blended Synchronous Learning Classrooms. Georgetown, VA: Georgetown University Press.
Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46(2), 327-369.
Van Beuningen, C., De Jong, N. and Kuiken, F. (2012). Evidence on the effectiveness of comprehensive error correction in second language writing. Language Learning, 62(1), 1-41.