Oral Corrective Feedback: Its effects on the acquisition of English, teaching practices and teachers’ and students’ beliefs

This doctoral thesis aims to contribute to the growing body of research which shows that oral \ncorrective feedback or error correction is beneficial for second language acquisition. It also \nseeks to address the pedagogical question of how oral feedback can be implemented in \ncommunicative language classrooms. With these aims in mind, a series of three empirical \nstudies was designed based on a review of the existing literature on oral corrective feedback. \nFirst of all, a quasi-experimental classroom study was carried out to compare the effects of \ntwo types of feedback on the accurate oral production and acquisition of the English regular \nand irregular past simple tense. Two intact classes of intermediate learners at a Spanish \nuniversity carried out communicative storytelling tasks during which they received either \nelicitation or metalinguistic feedback on their past tense errors. Both types of feedback were \nfound to impact the acquisition of the target structure positively, but there were some \nindications that metalinguistic feedback could be more helpful for the immediate repair of \nstudents’ errors and could also be more effective for the acquisition of the target structure. \nMoreover, metalinguistic feedback was found to have larger effects than elicitation on the \nacquisition of the irregular past tense. This study also indicates that oral corrective feedback, \neven in an explicit form, can be combined successfully with a communicative focus, since the \nstudents responded favourably to the treatment and stated that their confidence and fluency \nhad grown. \nA second empirical study investigated the feedback practices of 10 adult EFL teachers and \ncompared these to their stated beliefs about error correction, elicited by means of an openended \nquestionnaire. It was found that the most frequently used way of correcting was \nrecasting or reformulating the student’s utterance, which confirms results from previous \nobservational studies. The teachers stated they felt feedback was important, but at the same \ntime they expressed a concern for the promotion of fluency and confidence. It also appears \nthat most teachers are not fully aware of how they correct their students’ spoken errors. \nFinally, a larger number of teachers and students from an adult EFL and a secondary school \ncontext took part in a survey-study which elicited their attitudes to oral corrective feedback. \nPrevious findings that students tend to ask for much more feedback than their teachers \nbelieve to be necessary were confirmed in this study. Moreover, the teachers and students \nalso disagreed about the best way of correcting, since the students showed a preference for \nmore explicit types while the teachers were not convinced of the effectiveness of these \ntechniques. Finally, teachers’ preoccupation with possible negative affective reactions to \ncorrective feedback do not appear to be justified based on the results of this survey-study, \nsince the majority of both adult and teenage students stated they rarely or never experience \nfeelings such as embarrassment or inhibition as a result of being corrected when they speak. In conclusion, based on these results it appears that teachers should not be afraid to use more \nexplicit types of feedback, since (1) these were found to be beneficial for the accurate \nproduction and acquisition of certain grammatical structures, (2) they seem to be compatible \nwith a communicative focus and (3) they tend to be preferred by students.