The Importance Of Teachers’ Corrective Feedback In Second Language Acquisition

Defining ‘Error’

Discuss teachers feedback to student’s errors in EFL Classroom.

Like a child learning a mother tongue, any learner will inevitably experience some language errors while learning a second language. In the 1950s, “error” was once regarded as a failure in language learning. It seems that once a learner makes a mistake in practice, he is a failure. However, with the further development of linguistics, pedagogy and psychology, people changed their opinions on “error”. To date, correcting “errors” made by learners in second language acquisition has been considered as an important way to help students succeed in language learning.

Teachers, as the instructors of teaching activities, undoubtedly play a crucial guiding role in the students’ learning. At the same time, teachers also must have a clear understanding of errors made by students and be good at classifying these problems, which helps students to correct errors on EFL classroom. Lyster (1997) claims that teachers’ corrective response can increase students’ uptake, which shows the importance of teachers’ feedback.

This assignment includes six parts. The first part is a brief introduction to students’ errors and teachers’ feedback. The second part composes a review of previous researches and definitions of key terms. In the third part, this assignment summarizes the proposes and content of the video lesson. After that, in the fourth part, it focusses on the distribution of students’ error types and teachers’ response type and attempts to find relationship between them. The fifth part is a brief conclusion of the effects of teachers’ response and the last part is references.  

Students’ errors200

Researchers holds different opinions on the definition of “error”.  Corder (1967) is a pioneer in making a definition of “error”. In the article “The Significance of Learners’ Errors”, he contrasts the “error” with the “mistake”. According to his theory, errors are deviations of language using which can indicate learners’ learning states. However, mistakes are wrong language productions made by learners which are related to “processing failures (Corder, 1967:167)” such as learners’ memory or condition.  Allwright and Bailey (1991: 84) further develops this theory and states that errors are “production of a linguistic form that deviates from the correct form”. Brown (1994:205) also claims that errors are deviations form native speakers’ grammar rules.

There are different types of students’ errors and Lyster and Ranta (1997) divide these errors into four categories: phonological, grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic error. 1)  Phonological error refers to the incorrect pronunciation and intonation of words which may be caused by improper stress or incorrect pronunciation of syllables. 2) grammatical error refers to wrong structures of sentences which are against grammar rules. 3) lexical error refers to improper use of words in the content, such as inaccurate use of synonym, which may be caused by misunderstanding of meanings and usages of words. 4) pragmatic error refers to expressions which are not used by native-speakers but are grammatical right.

Types of Errors Made by Students

Teachers’ feedback200

Teacher’s feedback is an important method for student to recognize the rightness of their answers and there are many kinds of feedback classification. Considering the function of feedback, Nunan (1991) suggests that feedback can be divided into positive feedback and negative feedback. Positive feedback refers that the teacher uses positive judgements to encourage students, while negative feedback refers that the teacher uses different methods to tell students their errors and helps them to correct. Based on this classification, Carroll and Swain (1993) further divided negative feedback into two subcategories: explicit negative feedback and implicit negative feedback. Negative feedback can also be called corrective feedback, which is most frequently used in EFL class.

In a research of teacher-student interaction, Lyster and Ranta (1997) summarized six types of teachers’ feedback to students’ error by observing several French lessons. These feedbacks are 1) explicit correction. 2) recasts. 3) clarification requests. 4) metalinguistic feedback. 5) elicitation. 6) repetition. In 2007, Ranta and Lyster summed up these six categories into two broad categories: reformulations and prompts. The first four types of feedback can be classified into reformulations and the last two types of feedback can be classified in to prompts.

Do 3,4,5 sections  total 1300words  need 5 references

Summary of the lesson 300

The lesson begins with the teacher introducing the lesson topic to the students; students grievances. The teacher takes the question-answer approach to carry out the lesson objectives. As this is a language class, the educator deliberately starts with the most basic thing which is defining the terms used in the topic. The students give their understanding of the name which is made from grief and settles on a simple definition that a grievance is a complaint.

The trainer goes on to distribute a handout which has several pages. The learners are given a four minutes window period to discuss the questions in groups of threes and some in pairs. After the four minutes elapse, the professor asks feedback from several of the class members (Wang & Selby, 2017). The first question is about personal future, and a student by the name of David explains that shortly he wants to be studying at a UK university. The second question is about the challenges that students face while they are learning especially international students. One of the scholars responds that students face homesick and accommodation problems as they are studying far off country from home. Also, students describe the school fees paid by international scholars as an astronomical fee or excessive fees.

Types of Teachers’ Feedback

Students are given chances to spell the words as they interact in class. For instance, the word “harsh” is spelled in class. Also, there is a picture with a caption, and the lecturer asks one of the students to translate it to the rest of the class members.

One of the key things to note from this lesson is the practice of indicating and differentiating parts of speech. For example, when the word discriminate is mentioned, the class goes further into determining the proposition it uses and its form as a noun.

Learners have a perfect opportunity to explain in class a picture they have been presented with. The teacher takes this chance to guide them through as he asks synonyms of words like an obligation. As the class ends, they discuss the comparison of UK GDP with other four European countries. Then they conclude that regarding education, one would need at least $12,000 to get an education in the UK, which is way high compared to countries like Finland.

Distribution of student error types250

Student’s Errors
Grammatical Errors	Proportion	Lexical Errors	Proportion	Phonological Errors	Proportion	Pragmatic Errors	Proportion
9	33%	5	18%	6	22%	7	29%

Phonological error refers to the incorrect pronunciation and intonation of words which may be caused by improper stress or incorrect pronunciation of syllables.

1. Grammatical error refers to wrong structures of sentences which are against grammar rules.
2. Lexical error refers to improper use of words in the content, such as inaccurate use of synonym, which may be caused by misunderstanding of meanings and usages of words.
3. Pragmatic error refers to expressions which are not used by native-speakers but are grammatical right (Steinberg & Kraft, 2017).

From the above table, we can deduce the following;

Grammatical errors account for slightly higher than 33% of the errors made by the students.

Lexical errors on the other hand, are the least errors committed by students.

In terms of significance, there is no much difference between the highest committed errors and the least committed.

This being class comprising of international students, pragmatic errors have accounted for a significant percentage.

Distribution of teacher response types250

Most researchers consider teacher correction a central practice in EFL and ESL contexts and have proved its effectiveness. Teacher feedback is more effective for improving grammatical errors than peer or self-correction. Affective factors are also important in the success of feedback and studies suggest that students have a preference for teacher feedback over other types (Luciana, 2017). The table below shows the different types of teacher’s feedback to student’s errors;

Teacher’s feedback to students errors
Reformulations	Prompts
Explicit Corrections	%	Recasts	%	Clarification Requests	%	Metalinguistic	%	Elicitation	%	Repetition	%
6	22	3	11	2	7	5	18	4	14	7	29

From the table above, we can conclude that;

Repetition account for the highest percentage of the teacher’s feedback. This might be due to differences in pronunciations and the fact that this is an international class and thus it’s made of people who don’t have the same accent.

Very few instances has been shown where the trainer was requested to clarify a given idea or point. All students seemed to have a rough idea of what they were being taught.

Relationship between Error Types and Response Types

Explicit, repetition and metalinguistic formed the dominant part of the response to student’s errors from the lecturer.

To demonstrate the relationship between the error types and the response types used by the trainer, I am going to pick out illustrations from lesson six video.

In the first instance, when the tutor asks the members of the class the synonym to the word obligations. Everyone seemed to give the wrong answer. However, the teacher, without correcting the error that occurred, continued to pose another question asking for further information, which indicates that the teacher is interested in the student’s answer. Thus, the interaction goes beyond the original question and answer. Finally, he even constructs a sentence and leaves a gap so that it is easier for the student’s to fill in.

Another instance, happens when the trainer ask the students to describe what they can see on the images provided. Further the learners are made to compare the images in terms of age, gender, countries and so on.

The trainer is keen to ask the members of the class to group themselves and discuss the questions. The first time they group is at the beginning of the lesson where they have to group themselves into groups of three students and duos in each group. They are then to discuss the three questions provided and share with the rest of the class. The second occurrence where the professor asks the students to group themselves is when he provides them with two different images with people who seem to be in a protest. The students are to discuss their observations in groups and then pick a representative to make a presentation to the class members. This specific trainer is concerned with how the students spell words, whether they know the synonyms or the prepositions that go with particular nouns. At times, the trainer prompts some students to give their take on the topic. The teacher is inquisitive and if a student answers in a certain unexpected way, he asks a follow-up question giving the student the chance to offer a clarification.

As the lesson comes to an end, we see the trainer interested in helping the student decide the most affordable country to be a student in. This the teacher achieves by comparing these nations’ GDP. He initiates the concept by explaining GDP to the class. GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product and is the value obtained after a country’s wealth is divided by its population. The GDP of four other counties are compared with that of the UK.

On all the errors committed by the students, the trainers corrected them by use of positive feedback (Liu & Ding, 2015). Not really telling the student is wrong but rather asking them to explain and give more information on the same.

Conclusion 200

To sum it up, the teacher-learner interaction becomes fruitful depending on how the trainer responds to their students. The approach taken for instance by the teacher in lesson six, is one where students start from the simple known things to complex stuff that require more understanding. The trainer indicates every important point, for instance all parts of speech are well noted on the board as this is a language lesson.

To minimize the errors, the teacher has taken the approach of giving the student’s time to fully participate in the class. It’s more of a class discussion that it is a lecture. Students are given a chance to state whether the word on board is a noun or an adjective and if it’s the latter, they name other forms of the word.

With a manageable number of students and minimum distractions, a committed lecturer who involves all the learners, then the learning of a foreign language as a second language is made even easier (Farshi & Safa, 2015). Student’s errors are greatly minimized when there is a tutor to guide the learners through the learning process. In my view, more structured lessons should be introduced to help learns learn a single concept at a given sitting.

References

Farshi, S. S., & Safa, S. K. (2015). The Effect of Two Types of Corrective Feedback on EFL Learners’ Writing Skill. Advances In Language And Literary Studies, 6(1), 26-30.

Liu, Y., & Ding, S. (2015). THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHERS’ QUESTIONING AND FEEDBACK ON STUDENTS’ AFFECT IN THE INTERACTION OF EFL CLASSROOM. International Journal Of Arts & Sciences, 8(8), 467.

Luciana, P. (2017). Dealing with Students’ Errors: Oral Corrective Feedback in the Italian EFL Classroom. Altre Modernità, Vol 0, Iss 0, Pp 98-117 (2017), (0), 98. doi:10.13130/2035-7680/8305

Steinberg, M. P., & Kraft, M. A. (2017). The Sensitivity of Teacher Performance Ratings to the Design of Teacher Evaluation Systems. Educational Researcher, 46(7), 378. doi:10.3102/0013189X17726752

Wang, J., & Selby, K. L. (2017). Combining reading quizzes and error analysis to motivate students to grow. Education, (4), 418.

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