Mina Drever, Training and Development Agency for Schools, UK Interactional corrective feedback in first language (L1) and second/foreign language (L2) acquisition and learning: does it have the same effect? This paper reports on theoretical investigations into language learning and teaching that spanned more than half a century, and empirical findings published in my doctoral thesis in 2001. The empirical enquiry focused on the teaching of English in multilingual classrooms in England, at a time of an apparent “acquisitional” approach to language teaching before the National Literacy Strategy was introduced into the schools’ curriculum in 1998. This paper suggests that corrective feedback permeates all aspects of language teaching and learning that will be considered by the Language Education Framework working group. Whether language is taught as a discrete subject (LS), or as language across the curriculum (LAC), or as language of school education (LE), there are implications for policy makers, curriculum planners, teachers and learners. SLIDE 2. In each of these three contexts are implicated levels of competence, which is at the core of questions related to social inclusion, knowledge about language, dialect versus standard language and cognition. Linguistic competence in these three language teaching contexts is implicated in all the domains of language use – personal communication, social and formal interactions, educational and professional performance, in which are in turn implicated knowledge about language, teaching approaches, assessment, standard versus non-standard language and pronunciation. AND central to all these questions is assessment for learning, in which interactional corrective feedback plays – SLIDE 3 - a significant role, especially in the context of language of school education and in language across the curriculum. In such contexts the questions of competence and learnability become crucial. For example, How much Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 1 language is necessary and by what stage in order to tackle complex concepts such as longitude and latitude in a geography context? Should learners be allowed to believe that their performance is, on the whole, error-free? What happens to the learners when the linguistic demands of the curriculum become very sophisticated? How does a fluent EL2 speaker work out, without intervention, the subtle but important semantic difference between ‘to be frightened of’ and ‘to be frightened for’ in the analysis of the emotions of an army towards its general in a history context? During one of my teaching sessions with a group of 14-year-olds (one Chinese who was a fluent speaker of English and three EL1 students), none of the students had understood the task’s instruction, requiring them to discuss why an army was frightened for its general. All four students wrote about why the soldiers were frightened of their general. Neither could they distinguish between these two questions: (a) what do you think of the weather today? – requiring expressing an opinion; and (b) what’s the weather like today? – requiring a statement of fact. The answer to both questions by all four students was: it’s raining, which is the appropriate answer to (b) but not to (a). This example leads us to ask WHY WE SHOULD CORRECT ERRORS - SLIDE 4 1. self-repair Controversy surrounds the issue of corrective feedback, in the L1 and L2 literature, and much of it stems from the notion that errors are indications that language learning is taking place (Corder, 1967, 1981; Dulay and Burt, 1974; Tomasello and Heron, 1989) and they should not be corrected. Furthermore it is often posited that learners will spontaneously self-repair (Karmiloff-Smith, 1985; Krashen, 1985, 1987), and error correction can be harmful to L2 development (Holley and King, 1971) as well as counterproductive in the young child’s L1 acquisition (Braine, 1971; McNeil, 1966). Ideally, said Long, once the feedback has been given, students should make the ‘correcting move’ (Long, 1977, p. 279) before teachers provide the correction. Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 2 And this premise implies that learners must understand the feedback, and possess the appropriate linguistic knowledge to self-repair (Karmiloff-Smith, 1985; Carroll and Swain, 1993). Self-repair also depends on the types of errors that have been produced (Corder, 1967), on implicit (Karmiloff-Smith, 1985) and explicit linguistic knowledge (Krashen, 1985, 1987) of learners and on shared metalanguage between learners and teachers (Carroll and Swain, 1993). 2. transitional competence Corder (1967) distinguished between two types of errors made by both L1 adults and L2 speakers. He classified as “performance” mistakes ‘unsystematic’ slips of the tongue, while errors, are ‘systematic’ (Corder, 1967, p. 166) in the sense that they result from inadequate knowledge of the system of language. They represent the ‘transitional competence’ (Corder, 1967 p 166 – italics in original) which is being acquired by learners – both in L1 and L2 – on the basis of hypothesis testing. When errors occur during this process, they are evidence that rules are being induced and language learning is taking place (Allwright and Bailey, 1991; Corder, 1967; Tomasello and Heron, 1988). 3. metalinguistic awareness The development of metalinguistic awareness, though under the guise of different terms, is the common ground between the L1 and L2 studies reviewed and they suggested that it may not be attainable without explicit instruction and corrective feedback. Explaining why a sentence construction is not correct, knowing why a verb is better suited to a particular intention, making grammaticality judgements involves metalinguistic reflection (Pratt et al., 1984) for which it is necessary to be metalinguistically aware, to be able “to reflect upon and manipulate the structural features of spoken language” (Pratt et al., 1984, p. 129). Metalinguistic awareness is considered important to the development of cognitive skills (Ely, 1997; Pratt and Grieve, 1984a, 1984b), to reading (Demont Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 3 and Gombert, 1996; Donaldson, 1978; Downing, 1977; Titone, 1993) and to all learning (Lee, 1997; Pratt et al., 1984). Pratt and Grieve (1984a) argued that as children develop an awareness of the nature of cognitive functions, they gain ‘more control of … thinking’ (Pratt and Grieve, 1984a, p. 9). 4. fossilisation Fossilisation is an interlanguage (Long, 2003, White 2003) phenomenon and can occur when learners receive no information as to the correctness or incorrectness of their production and applies to both inappropriate and appropriate constructions (Vigil and Oller, 1976). L2 children of primary school age have been observed to display fossilisation errors (Selinker et al., 1975) previously associated only with adult L2 learners (Selinker, 1972, Han and Odlin, 2006). WHAT ERRORS SHOULD BE CORRECTED, SLIDE 5, WHEN and HOW? It is clear that corrective feedback should focus on Corder’s systematic errors which may fossilise thus affecting adversely the development of a correct interlanguage. The timing of error correction The timing of corrective feedback depends on whether it is a mistake or an error in Corder’s (1967) sense. In the case of competence errors, the decision will be dictated by a number of factors: is it a new error or one that’s been encountered before? Should it be dealt with immediately or should it be postponed (Allwright and Bailey, 1991; Long, 1977)? There are advantages and disadvantages to any timing. Immediate treatment interrupts learners’ flow and may not be positively effective (Vigil and Oller, 1976). Postponing it to a future lesson will be less effective, as time elapses between the error and the treatment (Chaudron, 1977, Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 4 1988; Long, 1977). Yet this may be necessary, particularly if the error is common to the whole class (Holley and King, 1971). HOW should errors be corrected? According to the literature corrective feedback should be varied (Allwright and Bailey, 1991). It should facilitate monitor use, i.e. the ability to self-correct resulting from learned knowledge of grammatical forms (Krashen, 1985, 1987). It should be appropriately pitched with effective support (Tomasello and Heron, 1989; Vigil and Oller, 1976). It should emphasise content and communication of meaning (Holley and King, 1971). These maxims from the L2 literature suggest four dimensions – SLIDE 6 - to corrective feedback: 1. Types and features of corrective feedback include recasts (repetitions and expansions), clarification requests, confirmation checks (Chaudron, 1977, 1988). 2. Cognitive orientation: focuses on linguistic devices that allow learners to develop their explicit grammatical knowledge necessary to self-monitoring (Krashen, 1987; Vigil and Oller; 1976). 3. Psychological: corrective feedback can be negative, positive and neutral (Vigil and Oller, 1976). Each must address the affective (i.e. appeal to emotional attitudes) as well as the cognitive nature of learning, but there must be balance between them (Edwards, 1995c; Vigil and Oller, 1976). The most effective in encouraging appropriate grammatical modifications in learners is the positiveaffective and negative-cognitive combination (Vigil and Oller, 1976), i.e. when corrective feedback is accompanied by positive and encouraging tones of voice, gestures and facial expressions. 4. One super-dimension that encompasses all these aspects is the implicit–explicit dichotomy. Explicit feedback is any feedback that overtly states that a learner’s output is not correct, with clear information about the state of the Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 5 learner’s utterance. Implicit feedback consists of devices such as confirmation checks and requests for clarification, from which learners should infer that the form of their utterance is responsible for the teacher’s comprehension problems (Carroll and Swain, 1993 p. 361). The advantage of explicit feedback can be outweighed by the demands on learners’ language processing abilities, like interpretation of the feedback. This in turns requires knowledge of ‘specialised vocabulary and specialised genre … [which may be] … beyond the comprehension of the untrained’ (Carroll and Swain, 1993 p. 362). On the other hand, implicit feedback may not be very useful in so far as it may ‘fail to indicate the source of the error … [and it requires]…. much inferencing on the part of the learners’ (Carroll and Swain, 1993 p. 362). EVIDENCE IN THE LITERATURE - Feedback to children and adults in LA and SLA literature My literature investigation focused on primary classrooms with first and second speakers of English. My search for guidelines on corrective feedback revealed no study, up to 2001, on corrective feedback, in L1 primary classrooms. [Indeed up to 2004, there was no evidence that anyone was looking at corrective feedback in the primary language classroom, according to Black, speaking at a primary languages conference in Cambridge.] I thus searched the language acquisition literature of very young children for any evidence for and/or against corrective feedback in L1 learning. Language acquisition and corrective feedback in young children There is controversy in the L1 literature on whether adults provide corrective feedback to young children, and if they do, whether children a) notice it and b) are capable of learning from it (Bohannon III and Stanowicz, 1988, 1989, 1997; Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 6 Bohannon III et al., 1990; Brown and Bellugi, 1964; Brown and Hanlon, 1970; Gordon, 1990; McNeil, 1966; Marcus, 1993). Some researchers saw expansions as maternal imitations of the content of children’s utterances, albeit with added grammatical forms, but they were not sure that this was feedback with any role in language learning. Research in the last 10 years suggests that very young children are capable of learning from some form or other of corrective feedback (Saxton, 1998, Saxton et al, 2005, Saxton et al., 2006). Recasts have been extensively investigated in the observational L1 literature but there is no agreement on their exact role in language acquisition (Bohannon III and Stanowicz, 1988). Recasts are “simple” or “complex” (Baker and Nelson, 1984) reformulations of children’s utterances, which may or may not contain errors. When they reformulate correct utterances recasts are modelling structures that may or may not be already part of a child’s current linguistic knowledge (Farrar, 1992; Nelson, 1977; Nelson et al., 1973). Feedback to children in L2 Studies in second language classrooms suggest that implicit corrective feedback in communicative language teaching classrooms can have a direct effect on learners’ output accuracy (Lightbown and Spada, 1990). Characterised by ‘meaning negotiation and meaning exchange leading to mutual understanding’ (Speidel, 1987, p. 104) they provide a great deal of ‘rough tuning’ (Speidel, 1987, p. 110) in the form of model/feedback, i.e. when teachers extend, expand, reformulate – recast– learners’ responses, they simultaneously provide corrections and modelling to learners’ linguistic errors. However, Chaudron (1977) analysed teachers’ feedback in six of this type of classroom talk (learners aged 13–15) and discovered that – SLIDE 7 - the most effective corrective feedback first located errors and immediately rejected them, in the form of repetition of the error with emphatic tone. Then metalinguistic explanation for errors was provided to encourage learners to self-correct. In the Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 7 absence of self-correction, the original question was rephrased, and, if necessary, other learners were asked to help. Teachers’ least successful – SLIDE 8 responses to learners’ errors were exact repetitions of grammatical errors and expansions because they did not lead to correct responses by students. Expansions are a form of recasts that did not lead to learner uptake in two studies by Lyster and Ranta (1997) and Lyster (1998) with 9-11 year olds. Lyster found recasts ambiguous and ineffective in ‘communicative classrooms’ (Lyster, 1998, p. 74) where the line between content and form is rather blurred. The most successful type of feedback, according to Lyster and Ranta (1997), was metalinguistic. Lyster and Ranta (1997) also found that teachers’ feedback was highly idiosyncratic and ambiguous. Closer analysis by Lyster (1998) of Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) data revealed that the intonation of teachers’ recasts rendered them ambiguous. Ambiguity increased when recasts were accompanied by “signs of approval”. And in 103 instances teachers responded affirmatively to the substantive content of students’ ill-formed utterances. (Lyster, 1998 p. 70). Feedback to L2 adults Similar results on feedback were found in L2 studies with adults. Tomasello and Heron’s (1988, 1989) garden-path technique offered an interesting combination of implicit instruction and explicit metalinguistic feedback, effective in arresting L1 transfer errors (1989) and L2 generalisation errors (1988). Carroll et al. (1992) conducted an experiment with implicit feedback to French L1 university students learning EL2 of intermediate and advanced proficiency. They concluded that implicit feedback plus positive input affected long-term lexical learning but had no effect on morphological generalisation. And Carroll and Swain’s (1993) experiments tested the effects of implicit and explicit feedback on EL2 learning by Spanish L1 speakers with intermediate proficiency in EL2. They showed that explicit negative feedback with Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 8 metalinguistic explanation led to correct application of dative alternation rules (for example, ‘John sent a letter to Mary’ can alternate with ‘John sent Mary a letter’ p. 363) and understanding that there are verbs that cannot alternate. MAIN FINDINGS – EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION – SLIDE 9 On the basis of these theoretical indications, I carried out an investigation on corrective feedback in 65 English primary schools classrooms in 33 education authorities. In each school one teacher completed a questionnaire and a second teacher in a separate school was interviewed. The questionnaire and interview were cross-validated to get a picture of how class-teachers in thirty-three authorities taught English and corrected errors in multilingual classrooms in the mid 1990s. A sample of eight teachers was selected from the questionnaire respondents for the observation study which told me if teachers did in reality what they said they did in the questionnaire. Summary of empirical results – instructional approach – how teacher said they taught The results from the questionnaire and interview indicated that all 65 teachers in thirty-three authorities intervened in the acquisition of their EL1 and EL2 children’s language competence. Sixty-nine per cent of them did so with a communicative approach, providing “rough tuning” (Speidel, 1987 p. 110) when necessary, in a sort of “guided acquisition”, as one interview teacher put it. Summary of empirical results – error correction – how teachers said they corrected Covert feedback emerged as the overall feedback type from the questionnaire and interview analysis – SLIDE 10- Although the results revealed differences between interview and questionnaire teachers, which were attributed to method design, Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 9 covert feedback was mentioned many more times, suggesting that covert feedback was likely to be selected by more teachers than overt or mixed feedback. The latter contained covert and overt feedback, making it a recipe for confusion and ambiguity, as already found in the literature. Covert correction to speaking was mentioned by an almost equal number of questionnaire (19) and interview (16) teachers – SLIDE 11 - . The predominant mention of covert over overt feedback to speaking by both sets of teachers was confirmed by the highly significant results of two Wilcoxon two-tailed signed ranks tests. Among the questionnaire teachers, covert feedback to speaking was mentioned by six times more teachers than those who gave overt feedback. And more than three times the number of interview teachers said to give covert feedback to speaking over those who did so overtly. Summary of empirical results – how teachers actually gave feedback Eight video-recorded observation lessons were analysed to see if teachers taught and corrected in reality as they claimed in the questionnaire. In-depth analysis of teacher responses to errors provides further insights into teacher feedback. The first thing – SLIDE 12 – to be said about the feedback given by the eight observation teachers is that, overall, they corrected covertly with 76% of all corrective feedback being covert. Secondly these 8 teachers corrected 71% of children’s linguistic errors covertly – SLIDE 13 – while 18.4% went ignored, because correction would break the flow of the interaction. Interesting results from a finer analysis of teachers’ observed feedback included the following: Corrective feedback was often confusing – SLIDE 14 -. Sometimes utterances in teachers’ corrective response wavered between overt and covert negative, and I categorised it as covert/overt/negative feedback. At other times it wavered between covert negative, implying rejection of pupils’ Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 10 productions, and covert positive, as if teachers could not make up their mind about the appropriateness of pupils’ contributions. I categorised this feedback as covert/positive/negative. Lyster (1998) also found ambiguity in the way teachers used recasts, often accompanied by signs of approval when they responded simultaneously to content and language errors. This is a problem specific to communicative classrooms, suggested Lyster: - SLIDE 15 This reveals what must be a source of ambiguity for young L2 learners as well as a dilemma for teachers whose mandate is to teach both language and content: namely, how to reinforce the substantive content of student messages while giving them clear messages about language form (Lyster, 1998 p. 71). An example of a covert/negative/positive/feedback is this teacher’s sequence of responses – SLIDE 16 - . A group of pupils and teacher were discussing the meaning of words with ch (pronounced as k) in them. At this point in the lesson it was the word Christmas. The teacher had asked for a sentence with this word in it. First she covertly approved (cvp) of it by repeating (rcr) a pupil’s correct response, line 2. She overtly accepted it (ovp) in the next three utterances. Then she changed her mind and she wanted more information (line 6) and asked a referential (rfl) question. At this point the feedback reverted to covert, but I was no longer sure whether it was covert/negative or covert/positive and categorised it as covert/negative/positive (cnp). When she said ‘that doesn’t explain a lot’ (line 8) she implied that the explanation given in line 1, which had already been accepted as correct in lines 3, 4, 5, was now only partially correct. This confusion is compounded by the use of tones 1 which denotes certainty in line 4 (very good) and line 8 (that doesn’t explain a lot); also tone 3 is neutral and could denote certainty or uncertainty (lines 2 and 7, exact repetition of child’s utterance). Intonation contributed highly to all eight teachers’ idiosyncratic feedback. For example one teacher gave exact repetitions in tone 5, which can express positive Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 11 and joyful surprise, as well as negative surprise expressing doubts. Another teacher prompted mostly in tone 3, a very neutral tone with no indication to pupils as to why the teacher was prompting, whether pupils had made an error or not. Do learners want corrective feedback? The working group considering these findings may also wish to consider what learners want. As part of my research I asked six bilingual children, over a period of 10 weeks of teaching programme how they felt about being corrected. They were almost unanimous in saying that they did not mind how they were corrected – SLIDE 17 - so long as teachers stuck to their method of doing so. Over a period of 10 lessons I asked the children on three occasions if they wanted to be corrected, how and why? Except for one occasion, when one child said that shed did not like written errors being corrected, there was a 94% consistency to wanting to be corrected, in any way the teachers chose, so that they could learn. IN CONCLUSION SLIDE 18 Second language acquisition literature findings on corrective feedback indicate that: metalinguistic corrective feedback is the most effective in promoting uptake and self-correction in communicative lessons recasts are the most used features of implicit corrective feedback BUT recasts do not lead to learner uptake and self-correction corrective feedback can be idiosyncratic AND confusing My empirical investigation confirmed these literature findings: the great majority of participant teachers gave implicit corrective feedback to linguistic errors in their multilingual classrooms. Much of their feedback was confusing and idiosyncratic. This, according to the literature, does not lead to learners modifying their internal grammar. And if erroneous productions are left uncorrected in the process of grammatical internalisation, fossilisation will become engrained and learners will Mina Drever, consultant, Training and Development Agencies for schools, London minadrever@aol.com 12 never know when they are making wrong inferences. Combining content and language teaching in language across the curriculum and in language for school education, as the European Language Framework aims to do, must give serious considerations to these issues. Otherwise many students in European classrooms will run the risk of failing examination and tests as a result of linguistic misconceptions, because maybe they do not understand the linguistic structure of a question, as my 14 year old students did in their history tasks. Indeed this is going to be the biggest challenge for curriculum planners and language teachers. References Allwright, D., & Bailey, K. M. 1991. 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