Does Teacher Feedback Make a Difference in Second Language Learning

1
Does Teacher FeedbackMake a Differencein Second
Language Learning?

• Dr. Roy Lyster
• McGill University
• Montreal, Canada

2
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?)

3
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 How is formal correspondence different
  in English and French?
• Student 1 The thing at the bottom
• Serge The thing at the bottom?!
• Student 1 The final salutation

4
Feedback Terminology

• Error correction
• Negative feedback
• Corrective feedback
• Interactional feedback
• Negotiation of meaning
• Negotiation of form

5
Rationale for FeedbackTransfer-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.

6
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.

7
Recasts

• In a recast, the teacher implicitly reformulates
  the students 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, thats true that it could be a
  boat, but there theyre giving addresses.

8
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)

9
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)

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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).

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Disadvantages of Recasts

• Recasts do not lead to any self- or peer-repair
  when there is repair, the student can only repeat
  the teachers reformulation
• In L2 classrooms, many recasts can be ambiguous
  and therefore do not help learners to notice
  their mistakes (Lyster, 1998).

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Ambiguity of Recasts

• Recasts Compete with Non-Corrective Repetition
• Recast
• T6 What smells so good? Allen?
• St Sap maple.
• T6 Maple sap. Thats good.
• Non-corrective repetition
• T6 What do we call the baby of a hen? Nicole?
• St Chicks.
• T6 Chicks. Thats good.

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Ambiguity of Recasts

• Recasts Compete with Signs of Approval
• Example 1
• T5 What are orders?..Yes?
• St Its, just like uhh you say us, do this,
  do that
• T5 Exactly, its 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, thats good.

14
Perlette and the Water Cycle

• T5 Whats a stream again? Yes?
• StA Its like a small lake.
• T5 A small lake we said?
• StA Its an little river.
• T5 Thats it. Its a little river, O.K.?
  Because a lake is a, a place where theres water
  but its a ...
• Sts Like a circle.
• T5 And so she finds herself near a forest. What
  do they do in the forest? Will?
• StB They cut down trees.
• T5 They cut down trees.

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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 Thats it. So, they put the wood in the
  river so it gets transported from one place
  to another.

16
Perlette and the Water Cycle

• T5 And when hes talking to Perlette, what
  happens to the fish?
• St Hes going to drink her.
• T5 Hes going to drink Perlette? No, hes not
  going to drink Perlette.
• St Uhm, the fish is friend of her.
• T5 Yes, thats it, theyre friends and they talk
  together. Then suddenly what happens? Yes?
• StD A person fishing took.
• T5 Exactly. Right, theres a hook with a little
  worm on it and so the fish turns around....

17
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.

18
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 I think that the worm will go under the soil.
• T I think that the worm will go under the soil?
  I thought that the worm would go under the
  soil.

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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 dont understand
• Repetition
• The teacher repeats the students erroneous
  utterance, adjusting the intonation to highlight
  the error
• He goed?

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Prompts

• Metalinguistic clues
• The teacher provides comments or questions
  related to the accuracy of the students
  utterance, without explicitly providing the
  correct form
• Do we say goed in English?
• No, thats 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?

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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).

22
Porcupines, Skunks, Hares, Giraffes

• T3 The porcupine? Sara?
• St Its the pines on its back, its ...
• T3 The pines. Do we say pines?
• StD The upines.
• T3 The...?
• StD The quills.
• T3 The quills. Very good. The quills.

23
Porcupines, Skunks, Hares, Giraffes

• T3 And so the skunk, what does it do? Karen
• St Uhm...it does...Well theres a stream of
  perfume that doesnt smell very good...
• T3 A stream of perfume, well call that a ...?
• Sts Liquid.
• T3 Liquid. A liquid . . .?
• StD Smelly.
• T3 A smelly liquid. We also call that ..

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Porcupines, Skunks, Hares, Giraffes

• T3 The hare. Joseph could you tell us what its
  means of defense are?
• St It runs fast and it hops.
• T3 It runs fast.
• StD It jump.
• T3 It jump?
• Sts It jumps.
• T3 It jumps, from the verb. . . ?
• Sts To jump.
• T3 To jump. It jumps about. Right, it jumps.
  Next, Joseph?

25
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?

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Effectiveness of Prompts

• Prompts can improve control over
  already-internalized 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).

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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)

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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
  post-tests
• Prompts were particularly effective for
  lower-proficiency learners, whereas
  higher-proficiency learners benefited similarly
  from both recasts and prompts.

29
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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References

• Ammar, A. (2003). Corrective feedback and L2
  learning Elicitation and recasts. Unpublished
  doctoral dissertation, McGill University,
  Montreal.
• Braidi, S. (2002). Reexamining the role of
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• Doughty, C. (2001). Cognitive underpinnings of
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