Roy Lyster

CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK AND LEARNER UPTAKE

This article presents a study of corrective feedback and learner uptake (i.e., responses to feedback) in four immersion classrooms at the primary level. Transcripts totaling 18.3 hours of classroom interaction taken from 14 subject-matter lessons and 13 French language arts lessons were analyzed using a model developed for the study and comprising the various moves in an error treatment sequence. Results include the frequency and distribution of the six different feedback types used by the four teachers, in addition to the frequency and distribution of different types of learner uptake following each feedback type. The findings indicate an overwhelming tendency for teachers to use recasts in spite of the latters ineffectiveness at eliciting student-generated repair. Four other feedback types—elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, clarification requests, and repetition—lead to student-generated repair more successfully and are thus able to initiate what the authors characterize as the negotiation of form.

Negotiation of form, recasts, and explicit correction in relation to error types and learner repair in immersion classrooms

This article presents a study of the relationships among error types, feedback types, and immediate learner repair in 4 French immersion classrooms at the elementary level. The database is drawn from transcripts of audio-recordings of 13 French language arts lessons and 14 subject-matter lessons totaling 18.3 hours and including 921 error sequences. Wecoded the 921 learner errors initiating each sequence as grammatical, lexical, or phonological, or as unsolicited uses of L1 (English) and corrective feedback moves as negotiation of form (i.e., elicitation, metalinguistic clues, clarification requests, or repetition of error), recasts, or explicit correction. Findings indicate that lexical errors favoured the negotiation of form; grammatical and phonological errors invited recasts, but with differential effects in terms of learner repair. Overall, the negotiation of form proved more effective at leading to immediate repair than did recasts or explicit correction, particularly for lexical and grammatical errors, but not for phonological errors. Phonological repairs resulted primarily from recasts.

Patterns of Corrective Feedback and Uptake in an Adult ESL Classroom

This article begins by synthesizing findings from observational classroom research on corrective feedback and then presents an observational study of patterns of error treatment in an adult ESL classroom. The study examines the range and types of feedback used by the teacher and their relationship to learner uptake and immediate repair of error. The database consists of 10 hours of transcribed interaction, comprising 1,716 student turns and 1,641 teacher turns, coded in accordance with the categories identified in Lyster and Rantas (1997) model of corrective discourse. The results reveal a clear preference for implicit types of reformulative feedback, namely, recasts and translation, leaving little opportunity for other feedback types that encourage learner-generated repair. Consequently, rates of learner uptake and immediate repair of error are low in this classroom. These results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that L2 learners may benefit more from retrieval and production processes than from only hearing target forms in the input.

INTERACTIONAL FEEDBACK AND INSTRUCTIONAL COUNTERBALANCE

This comparative analysis of teacher-student interaction in two different instructional settings at the elementary-school level (18.3 hr in French immersion and 14.8 hr Japanese immersion) investigates the immediate effects of explicit correction, recasts, and prompts on learner uptake and repair. The results clearly show a predominant provision of recasts over prompts and explicit correction, regardless of instructional setting, but distinctively varied student uptake and repair patterns in relation to feedback type, with the largest proportion of repair resulting from prompts in French immersion and from recasts in Japanese immersion. Based on these findings and supported by an analysis of each instructional settings overall communicative orientation, we introduce the counterbalance hypothesis , which states that instructional activities and interactional feedback that act as a counterbalance to a classrooms predominant communicative orientation are likely to prove more effective than instructional activities and interactional feedback that are congruent with its predominant communicative orientation. This research was supported by Standard Research Grants (410-98-0175 and 410-2002-0988) awarded to the first author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by a Nihon University Individual Research Grant for 2005 awarded to the second author. A version of this study was presented at the Second Language Research Forum held at Columbia University in October 2005. We are especially grateful to the participating teachers and their students and also to Yingli Yang for her role as research assistant in aggregating the datasets. We thank Sue Gass, Alison Mackey, Iliana Panova, Leila Ranta, and two SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

ORAL FEEDBACK IN CLASSROOM SLA

To investigate the pedagogical effectiveness of oral corrective feedback (CF) on target language development, we conducted a meta-analysis that focused exclusively on 15 classroom-based studies ( N = 827). The analysis was designed to investigate whether CF was effective in classroom settings and, if so, whether its effectiveness varied according to (a) types of CF, (b) types and timing of outcome measures, (c) instructional setting (second vs. foreign language classroom), (d) treatment length, and (e) learners’ age. Results revealed that CF had significant and durable effects on target language development. The effects were larger for prompts than recasts and most apparent in measures that elicit free constructed responses. Whereas instructional setting was not identified as a contributing factor to CF effectiveness, effects of long treatments were larger than those of short-to-medium treatments but not distinguishable from those of brief treatments. A simple regression analysis revealed effects for age, with younger learners benefiting from CF more than older learners.

EFFECTS OF FORM-FOCUSED PRACTICE AND FEEDBACK ON CHINESE EFL LEARNERS' ACQUISITION OF REGULAR AND IRREGULAR PAST TENSE FORMS

Conducted in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms at the university level in China, this quasi-experimental study compared the effects of three different corrective feedback treatments on 72 Chinese learners’ use of regular and irregular English past tense. Three classes were randomly assigned to a prompt group, a recast group, or a control group and then participated in form-focused production

Negotiation in Immersion Teacher-Student Interaction.

Abstract This paper explores the role of negotiation in teacher–student interaction and argues that the negotiation of meaning, defined as a set of conversational moves which work toward mutual comprehension, is too narrow a construct to fulfil its pedagogical potential in teacher–student interaction in communicative and content-based second language (L2) classrooms. Drawing on examples from immersion classrooms, where the overriding focus is on delivery of subject matter in the L2, an argument is presented in support of a more comprehensive view of negotiation that accounts for corrective feedback and distinguishes between meaning-focused and form-focused negotiation.

Research on form-focused instruction in immersion classrooms: Implications for theory and practice

This article presents a comparative analysis of five quasi-experimental studies involving close to 1,200 students, ranging in age from 7 to 14 ,i n49 French immersion classrooms in Canada – a content-based instructional context where learners develop high levels of communicative ability yet demonstrate a levelling-off effect in their grammatical development. The studies investigated the effects of form-focused instruction on four areas known to be difficult for anglophone learners of French: perfect vs. imperfect past tense, conditional mood, second-person pronouns and grammatical gender. Findings suggest that effective form-focused instruction in immersion contexts, at least with respect to interlanguage features that have reached a developmental plateau, includes a balanced distribution of opportunities for noticing, language awareness and controlled practice with feedback. Less effective instructional options overemphasise negotiation for meaning in oral tasks where message comprehensibility and communication strategies circumvent the need for learners to move beyond the use of interlanguage forms.

Content-based language teaching: Convergent concerns across divergent contexts

This article serves as the introduction to this special issue of Language Teaching Research on content-based language teaching (CBLT). The article first provides an illustrative overview of the myriad contexts in which CBLT has been implemented and then homes in on the five studies comprising the special issue, each conducted in a distinct instructional setting: two-way Spanish—English immersion in the USA, English-medium ‘nature and society’ lessons taught at a middle school in China, English-medium math and science classes in Malaysian high schools, English-medium history classes in high schools in Spain, and ‘sheltered instruction’ classes for English language learners in US schools. In spite of such divergent contexts, the five studies converge to underscore the pivotal role played by teachers in CBLT and the concomitant need for professional development to support them in meeting some of the challenges specific to CBLT.

Predictability in French gender attribution: A corpus analysis

This article presents a corpus analysis designed to determine the extent to which noun endings in French are reliable predictors of grammatical gender. A corpus of 9,961 nouns appearing in Le Robert Junior Illustrwas analysed according to noun endings, which were operationalised as orthographic representations of rhymes, which consist of either a vowel sound (i.e., a nucleus) in the case of vocalic endings or a vowel-plus-consonant blend (i.e., a nucleus and a coda) in the case of consonantal endings. The analysis classified noun endings as reliably masculine, reliably feminine, or ambiguous, by considering as reliable predictors of grammatical gender any noun ending that predicts the gender of least 90 per cent of all nouns in the corpus with that ending. Results reveal that 81 per cent of all feminine nouns and 80 per cent of all masculine nouns in the corpus are rule governed, having endings that systematically predict their gender. These findings, at odds with traditional grammars, are discussed in terms of their pedagogical implications.