Does Teacher Feedback
Make a Difference
in Second Language
Learning?
Dr. Roy Lyster
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
Teaching in the 80s
• Krashen said that feedback was useless, and harmful,
and would cause anxiety (more recently, see Krashen,
1994; Truscott, 1996).
 (I did not want anxious students, so I provided very little
feedback.)
• Researchers said that errors would diminish over time.
 (I wanted to be patient, so I provided very little feedback.)
• My students had studied their L2 for 8 years…
 (How long would it take for errors to work themselves
out?)
2
Serge and the
Negotiation of Form
• I observed a teacher named Serge who provided
feedback without causing any any observable anxiety
(Lyster, 1994).
• There was good-natured humour and the
communication flow did NOT stop.
• Serge “negotiated form” with his students:
 Serge:
 Student 1:
 Serge:
 Student 1:
How is formal correspondence different in English
and French?
The thing at the bottom
The thing at the bottom?!
The final salutation…
3
Feedback Terminology
• Error correction
• Negative feedback
• Corrective feedback
• Interactional feedback
 Negotiation of meaning
 Negotiation of form
4
Rationale for Feedback:
Transfer-appropriate Learning
• The context in which learning occurs should
resemble the context in which the learning will
be put to use (Segalowitz, 2000):
 Language features learned in isolated grammar
lessons may be remembered in similar contexts
(e.g., during a grammar test), but hard to retrieve
in the context of communicative interaction.
 Language features noticed during communicative
interaction may be more easily retrieved in
communicative contexts.
5
Teachable Moments:
Focus on Form
• Providing feedback “in the heat of the
moment” when a learner really has something
to say, rather than waiting till later…
• How can teachers do this? How can they focus
on form during meaningful interaction?
 By providing different types of interactional
feedback: recasts or prompts.
6
Recasts
• In a recast, the teacher implicitly reformulates the
student’s utterance, minus the error.
Example 1:
 Student: Before someone will takes* it.
 Teacher: Before someone takes it.
Example 2:
 Student: Or an* boat.
 Teacher: Yes, that’s true that it could be a boat, but there
they’re giving addresses.
7
Frequency of Recasts
• Recasts are the most frequent type of feedback in a
wide range of classroom settings:
 elementary immersion classrooms
 (Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Mori, 2002)
 university-level foreign language classrooms
 (Doughty, 1994; Roberts, 1995)
 high school EFL classrooms
 (Tsang, 2004)
 adult ESL classrooms
 (Ellis, Basurkmen, & Loewen, 2001; Panova & Lyster, 2002)
8
Theoretical Value of Recasts
• Based on claims that children frequently repeat their
parents’ recasts during L1 acquisition, recasts have been
promoted as an effective type of feedback;
• Some researchers hypothesize that recasts help learners
to notice the gap between interlanguage forms and target
forms, thus serving as “negative evidence”:
 Doughty (2001)
 Long (1996)
 Long & Robinson (1998)
9
Practical advantages…
• Recasts provide supportive scaffolding that
helps learners participate in lessons when the
target forms in question are beyond their
current abilities.
• Recasts are ideal for facilitating the delivery of
complex subject matter (Lyster, 2002).
10
Disadvantages of Recasts
• Recasts do not lead to any self- or peer-repair:
when there is repair, the student can only
repeat the teacher’s reformulation;
• In L2 classrooms, many recasts can be
ambiguous and therefore do not help learners
to notice their mistakes (Lyster, 1998).
11
Ambiguity of Recasts
Recasts Compete with Non-Corrective Repetition
Recast:
T6: What smells so good? Allen?
St: *Sap maple*.
T6: Maple sap. That’s good.
Non-corrective repetition:
T6: What do we call the baby of a hen? Nicole?
St: Chicks.
T6: Chicks. That’s good.
12
Ambiguity of Recasts
Recasts Compete with Signs of Approval
Example 1:
T5: What are orders?..Yes?
St: It’s, just like uhh *you say us*, ‘do this, do that’
T5: Exactly, it’s when someone tells us ‘Do that, go there, eat that’.
Example 2:
T6: A hole in which a rabbit lives, Patrick?
St: A *din*.
T6: A den, that’s good.
13
Perlette and the Water Cycle
T5:
StA:
T5:
StA:
T5:
Sts:
T5:
StB:
T5:
What’s a stream again? Yes?
It’s like a small lake.
A small lake we said?
It’s *an little* river.
That’s it. It’s a little river, O.K.? Because a lake is a, a
place where there’s water but it’s a ...
Like a circle.
And so she finds herself near a forest. What do they do in
the forest? Will?
They cut down trees.
They cut down trees.
14
Perlette and the Water Cycle
T5: What do they do to transport the wood?
StC: Um, you put the wood in the water and
the um, how do you say ‘emporter?
Sts: ‘Carries’.
T5: Carries, good.
StC: *Carries [] tree to an place and
another person who puts the wood*.
T5: That’s it. So, they put the wood in the
river so it gets transported from one
place to another.
15
Perlette and the Water Cycle
T5:
St:
T5:
St:
T5:
StD:
T5:
And when he’s talking to Perlette, what
happens to the fish?
He’s going to drink her.
He’s going to drink Perlette? No, he’s not
going to drink Perlette.
Uhm, the fish *is friend of her*.
Yes, that’s it, they’re friends and they talk
together. Then suddenly what happens? Yes?
*A person fishing took*.
Exactly. Right, there’s a hook with a little
worm on it and so the fish turns around.[...]
16
Perlette and the Water Cycle
T5: Why does she want to warm up do you
think? Yes?
StA: Because she *has* too cold to go into
all the [?]
T5: Because she is too cold, O.K. Yes?
StB: She *has* too frightened.
T5: Because she is frightened, yes.
17
Experimental Studies of Recasts
• Some experimental studies have shown that recasts
are more effective than no feedback
 in laboratory settings
 Long et al. (1998)
 Mackey & Philp (1998)
 in a classroom setting:
 Doughty & Varela (1998) showed that “corrective
recasting” was more effective than no feedback:
St:
T:
I think that the worm will go under the soil.
I think that the worm will go under the soil? I
thought that the worm would go under the soil.
18
Prompts: Negotiation of form
Clarification request
• The teacher pretends that the message has not been understood
and that a repetition or a reformulation is required:
 Pardon me?
 I don’t understand
Repetition
• The teacher repeats the student’s erroneous utterance, adjusting
the intonation to highlight the error:
 He goed?
19
Prompts
Metalinguistic clues
• The teacher provides comments or questions related to the
accuracy of the student’s utterance, without explicitly
providing the correct form:
 Do we say ‘goed’ in English?
 No, that’s not it.
Elicitation
• The teacher directly elicits correct forms from students by
asking questions such as:
 How do we say that in English?
 He what?
20
Prompts
• Self-repair
 Prompts lead to student-generated repair because,
unlike recasts, they withhold correct forms and
providing clues instead, pushing students to retrieve
correct forms on their own (i.e., peer- or self-repair).
• Frequency
 Prompts accounted for 38% of all feedback in French
immersion classrooms (Lyster & Ranta, 1997) and
26% in Japanese immersion classrooms (Mori, 2002).
21
Porcupines, Skunks, Hares, & Giraffes
T3:
St:
T3:
StD:
T3:
StD:
T3:
The porcupine? Sara?
It’s the pines on its back, it’s ...
The pines. Do we say “pines”?
The upines.
The...?
The quills.
The quills. Very good. The quills.
22
Porcupines, Skunks, Hares, & Giraffes
T3:
And so the skunk, what does it do? Karen
St:
Uhm...it does...Well there’s *a stream of
perfume* that doesn’t smell very good...
T3:
A stream of perfume, we’ll call that a ...?
Sts:
Liquid.
T3:
Liquid. A liquid . . .?
StD: Smelly.
T3:
A smelly liquid. We also call that [..]
23
Porcupines, Skunks, Hares, & Giraffes
T3:
St:
T3:
StD:
T3:
Sts:
T3:
Sts:
T3:
The hare. Joseph could you tell us what its
means of defense are?
It runs fast and it hops.
It runs fast.
It jump*.
It jump?
It jumps.
It jumps, from the verb. . . ?
To jump.
To jump. It jumps about. Right, it jumps. Next,
Joseph?
24
Porcupines, Skunks, Hares, & Giraffes
T3: Bigger than you would be what?
St:
*The giraffe*? [masc.]
T3: The giraffe? [masc.]
St:
The giraffe. [fem.]
T3: The giraffe.[fem.] But is the giraffe an
animal from Canada?
25
Effectiveness of Prompts
• Prompts can improve control over alreadyinternalized forms by providing opportunities
for:
 pushed output, hypothesized by Swain (1985,
1988) to move interlanguage development forward,
 practice that helps learners in the transition of
declarative to procedural knowledge (de Bot, 1996;
Lyster & Ranta, 1997).
26
Effectiveness of Prompts
• L2 learners benefit more from being pushed to retrieve
target language forms than from merely hearing the
forms in the input
 because the retrieval and subsequent production require a
deep level of processing that stimulates connections in
memory (de Bot, 1996).
• Studies comparing recasts with prompts in classroom
settings have shown that prompts are more effective
than recasts:
 Havranek & Cesnik (2001)
 Ammar (2003)
 Lyster (2004)
27
Ammar (2003)
• Third-person possessive determiners in English (his
and her) were targeted in three 6th-grade intensive ESL
classrooms over a four-week period.
• One class received recasts, another received prompts,
and the third received no feedback.
• The group receiving prompts significantly
outperformed the recast group on written and oral posttests
• Prompts were particularly effective for lowerproficiency learners, whereas higher-proficiency
learners benefited similarly from both recasts and
prompts.
28
Lyster (2004)
• Grammatical gender in French was targeted by three
5th-grade immersion teachers in different ways that
permitted comparisons of three oral feedback options:
prompts, recasts, and no feedback.
• A comparison group received no form-focused
instruction nor any pre-planned feedback on
grammatical gender.
• The analysis of eight proficiency measures
administered over time showed that the group receiving
prompts distinguished itself by being the only group to
significantly outperform the comparison group on all
eight measures.
29
When to use recasts…
• Depending on the interactional context,
learners are likely to notice the corrective
quality of many recasts, especially when:
 the recasts have been shortened and/or provided
with added stress to highlight the error
 the target forms are beyond the students’ current
abilities.
30
When to use prompts…
• Learners benefit from being pushed to produce
modified output by means of prompting,
especially when:
 recasts might be perceived ambiguously as
approving students’ use of non-target forms
 students have reached a developmental plateau in
their use of the non-target forms (i.e., fossilized
forms) and need to automatize target forms.
31
Conclusion
• Continued recasting of what students already
know is likely ineffective for ensuring
continued development of L2 accuracy.
• Continued prompting of learners to draw on
what they have not yet acquired will be equally
ineffective.
• Effective L2 teachers need to orchestrate the
use of both recasts and prompts, without
abandoning one at the expense of the other.
32
References
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McGill University, Montreal.
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