learners with information about the ungrammaticality of their utterances. When the interlocutor has the actual intention to provide such negative information, then we may want to speak of error correction. However, more often than not, it is impossible (for the researcher as much as for the parties involved in the interaction!) to decide whether the intention to correct was at work. Therefore, we will prefer the term negative feedback over error correction or the near- synonymous corrective feedback (both of which imply a clear pedagogical intention to correct) and also over negative evidence (which is used in formal linguistic discussions about what linguistic abstract information would be needed to reset certain values within the limits available in Universal Grammar; Beck et al., 1995). Negative feedback can be provided in interactive discourse orally, but it also occurs very often in writing (both in classrooms and in non-school contexts for professional, technical and creative writing) and in the context of technology- mediated communication and study. For reasons of length, I will restrict the discussion in this section to oral negative feedback (I offer some suggestions for readings in the area of feedback on L2 writing and technology-mediated events at the end of the chapter). In Chapter 10, you will see how negative feedback can be conceptualized if we adopt a radically social perspective. Specifically, this has been done in distinct ways by SLA researchers guided by Vygotskian (section 10.6), conversation analytical (section 10.9) and systemic functional linguistic (section 10.12) perspectives.
From the perspective of cognitive-interactionist researchers, negative feedback may come about as part of negotiating meaning or form. For example, a clarifica- tion request (e.g. sorry?) is offered when intelligibility is low and meaning itself needs to be negotiated. Nevertheless, it may convey to the learner an indication, albeit a most implicit and indirect one, that some ungrammaticality is present:
(12) Learner: what happen for the boat? Interlocutor: what?
Learner: what’s wrong with the boat?
(McDonough, 2005, p. 86)
At the other extreme, explicit corrections overtly focus on the form at fault and occur when a teacher clearly indicates to a student that some choice is non-target- like:
(13) Student: Ich empfehle den Beruf an
[I recommend that profession + particle an]
Teacher: Nein nein, empfehlen empfehlen ohne an, ich empfehle den Beruf [No, no, to recommend without the preposition an: ‘I recommend that profession’]
Somewhere in the middle are recasts and elicitations. Recasts occur when an interlocutor repeats the learner utterance, maintaining its meaning but offering a more conventional or mature rendition of the form. For example:
(14) Greg: Nagai aida o-hanashi shi-mashita kara, benkyoo shi-nakatta desu
[because I talked for a long time, I didn’t study] Interlocutor: Nagai aida o-hanashi shi-te i-ta kara desu ka?
[because you were talking for a long time?]
(Ishida, 2004, p. 375)
Elicitations include moves such as asking how do we say X? or directly asking the interlocutor to try again. When they occur in classrooms, the teacher may initiate an other-repetition and pause in the middle of the utterance at fault to let the student complete it correctly, as in (15):
(15) Teacher: Il vit où un animal domestique? Où est-ce que ça vit? [Where does a pet live? Where does it live?]
Student: Dans un maison [In a-masculine house] Teacher: Dans… ? Attention
[In… ? Careful] Student: Dans une maison
[In a-feminine house]
(Lyster, 2004, p. 405)
Elicitations like the one in (15) are didactic and are therefore typically issued by the teacher. They would be rarely issued by interlocutors outside the classroom context. Many language teachers and students believe the provision of negative feedback by the teacher in speaking and writing is a staple of good classroom instruction. And, at least logically, negative feedback would be the single most relevant way for L2 learners to figure out what is not possible in the target language. Among SLA researchers, however, there are dissenting voices who object that language is fundamentally learned without recourse to negative feedback information (Schwartz, 1993). Others maintain there is insufficient evidence to show conclusively that negative feedback works (Truscott, 1999). These sceptics discount the empirical evidence accumulated either because they feel it only reflects explicit, metalinguistic learning about the L2, or because they expect negative feedback should work across the board and universally in order to be pronounced useful, sometimes for both reasons. Most cognitive-interactionist researchers, on the other hand, argue that negative feedback is beneficial for learning (Long, 1996; Lyster et al., 1999; Russell and Spada, 2006).
How frequent is oral negative feedback? In non-classroom settings, early studies suggested that direct negative feedback is rare (Gaskill, 1980; Day et al., 1984). In essence, the same conversational principles that apply in natural L1 conversations
Negative feedback during meaning and form negotiation 73
and make other-repair deeply dispreferred (Schegloff et al., 1977) are powerful deterrents of other-correction in L2 conversations. Nevertheless, corrections may still happen, as Schmidt and Frota (1986) amply documented in both their recorded conversational data and their retrospective diary data. Their account suggests that whether corrections occur outside the classroom depends on the relationship between an L2 speaker and her interlocutors, and even on interlocutor personalities and how inclined towards didacticism they may be around L2 speakers.
In instructional settings, a good proportion of errors appear to be responded to. In classrooms, the lowest attested end of the range is feedback on 48 per cent of errors, reported by Panova and Lyster (2002) for ten hours of ESL lessons in Montreal with a majority of students who shared L1 Haitian Creole and French. The highest end is 90 per cent (or one negative feedback episode every 0.65 minutes), reported by Lochtman (2002) for ten hours of German as a foreign language lessons in Belgium with three high-school classrooms of 15- and 16-year-old speakers of Dutch as L1. In task-based dyadic interactions elicited in the laboratory with native-speaking interlocutors, somewhat lower rates of negative feedback are reported, probably because an instructional focus is not necessarily assumed by interlocutors. Between a half and a third of ungrammaticalities produced by learners appear to receive some kind of negative feedback in laboratory studies (e.g. Oliver, 1995; Iwashita, 2003; Mackey et al., 2003), but the proportion is sometimes lower (e.g. one-quarter of errors were responded to in Braidi, 2002).
How is negative feedback provided? Since the very beginnings of the field, SLA researchers have tried to identify and tally negative feedback after classifying it into a number of discrete move types: clarification requests, explicit corrections, recasts, elicitations and several more (other-repetition, prompts, translations, etc.). For the L2 classroom, the most influential of these taxonomies was developed by Roy Lyster at McGill University and his colleague Leila Ranta at Concordia University (Lyster and Ranta, 1997). They built on a complex coding system proposed 20 years earlier by Craig Chaudron (1977) in his dissertation at the University of Toronto. Yet, the caution is increasingly more frequently voiced that each of these ‘types’ can differ greatly in implementation and that any one of them can vary in, among other things, the degree of explicitness or implicitness it entails, which in turn often varies, as we will see, as a function of context.
A sobering illustration is provided by the burgeoning research on recasts. This type of negative feedback, shown earlier in (14), has attracted an unprecedented interest since the publication about a decade ago of the first classroom and laboratory recast studies, summarized in Table 4.1.
Spurred by the conflicting findings yielded in these and other studies, later discussions (e.g. Nicholas et al., 2001) have centred around the distinct nature of language classrooms and laboratories and the differences in implementation between rather implicit recasts, such as those documented by Lyster and Ranta (1997), and largely explicit recasts, such as those delivered quasi-experimentally by Doughty and Varela (1998). Indeed, even though recasts were proposed by Long (1996, 2006) to work precisely because they are reactive and implicit, and despite the fact that they are often considered to be potentially just a ‘conversational
lubricant’ (Ellis and Sheen, 2006, p. 585), Nicholas et al. (2001) made the important point that they can largely vary in how implicit they really are. Conversely, Ellis et al. (2006) note that what Lyster (2004) calls prompts is a category that includes both explicit and implicit moves.
In the future, then, it would be more desirable to be able to classify and analyse negative feedback episodes by attributes or features that can cut across (and abstract out of) specific types. One of these features ought to be degree of
explicitness, as proposed by Ellis and Sheen (2006; Sheen, 2006). Explicitness can be Oliver (1995)
Design: Descriptive, in the laboratory
Context: 8- to 13-year-old ESL students in Perth, Australia
Who: 96 dyads (NS–NNS, NNS–NNS and NS–NS) Task: Two-way communication tasks
Focus: Comparison of negotiation of meaning vs recasts after different error types
Results: 61% of errors were responded to; opaque non-target-like utterances were negotiated, transparent non-target-like utterances were recast; L2 children were able to incorporate the recast in a third of instances when it was conversationally appropriate to do so
Ortega and Long (1997)
Design: Quasi-experimental, in the laboratory Context: Third-semester college Spanish FL in
Hawai‘i, USA
Who: 30 dyads (learner–researcher) Task: One-way communication tasks Focus: Comparison of recasts vs models vs
control on two structures: object topicalization and adverb placement
Results: No effects of either treatment on object topicalization; for adverb placement, there was clear evidence of learning for the recast condition and of no learning for the model condition
Lyster and Ranta (1997)
Design: Descriptive, in the classroom Context: French immersion in Montreal, Canada Who: Fourth- and fourth-/fifth-graders (18.3 hours
from four different classrooms and teachers) Task: Regular content-based lessons (science, social studies, maths, French language arts) Focus: Moves in negative feedback sequences:
feedback moves (six types) and uptake moves (repair, with four types, and needs-repair, with six types)
Results: Teachers corrected 62% of student error turns; only 27% of these led to repair; teachers preferred recasts (55% of all negative feedback); recasts resulted in the least repair (31%), metalinguistic feedback and elicitation moves led to the most repair (c. 46%)
Doughty and Varela (1998)
Design: Quasi-experimental, in the classroom Context: ESL science classroom in the East
Coast, USA
Who: An intact class of 21 11- to 14-year-olds and their teacher–researcher
Task: Task-essential science reports embedded in the regular curriculum
Focus: Recasts on simple past tense –ed and conditionalwould
Results: Compared to a no-feedback class, the recast class showed clear gains on oral task tests that were maintained two months later; gains on written task tests were less clear and less durable
Table 4.1
Negative feedback during meaning and form negotiation 75
defined as the perceptual salience (e.g. intonation) and linguistic marking (e.g. by metalanguage) with which the negative information is delivered and thus the corrective intent is made clear to learners. Another promising feature would be
demand, which refers to main arguments for the benefits of prompts put forth by
Lyster (2004) and can be defined as the degree of conversational urgency exerted upon interlocutors to react to the negative feedback in some way, for instance, by incorporating it, modifying their output or self-correcting. While explicitness and demand have received the most attention to date, a third promising feature is
informativeness, defined as how much information is provided about the blame of
the ungrammaticality, for example, whether a model with the grammatical version of the utterance is included or withheld in a negative feedback event. We will see a very different attempt to categorize negative feedback episodes along a self- regulatory continuum in Chapter 10, section 10.6.
Just how effective has negative feedback proven to be? The accumulating evidence suggests that providing negative feedback in some form results in better post-test performance than ignoring errors (Russell and Spada, 2006). Much less agreement has been reached, however, with regard to when, how and why negative feedback works, when it does. In the last ten years, many studies have been designed to compare, descriptively or quasi-experimentally, different kinds of feedback. For example, a large number of studies have asked whether the learning potential of recasts is superior or inferior to negotiation for meaning (Oliver, 1995), models (Long et al., 1998; Iwashita, 2003; Leeman, 2003), prompts (Lyster and Ranta, 1997; Lyster, 1998, 2004; Ammar and Spada, 2006), or metalinguistic explanations (Ellis et al., 2006). Yet, the overall pattern of results indicates that when two or more implementations of negative feedback are compared, the more explicit one leads to larger gains, as observed by Suzanne Carroll and her Canadian colleagues in the early 1990s (see Carroll et al., 1992). This finding is hardly illuminating and comes as an extension of the same conclusion reached by Norris and Ortega (2000) in a meta-analysis of 49 instructional studies, featuring a range of instructional options that included grammar explanations, input manipulations, practice or output treatments and provision of various negative feedback regimes. At least as currently operationalized in treatments and measured in tests, explicit types of L2 instruction consistently result in more sizeable gains than implicit ones. The research also tells us increasingly more clearly and loudly that instructional context helps predict and understand not so much what negative feedback types teachers will prefer (since study after study shows teachers’ preferred strategy is recasts) but rather what degree of explicitness they will exert in their delivery of those types. Thus, in formal instructional settings that may be communicative but are not content- or meaning-based, negative feedback is delivered in a more explicit manner than in contexts where teacher and students are engaged in the business of learning content through the L2, such as immersion programmes (Sheen, 2004, 2006; Loewen and Philp, 2006). Moreover, within the same lesson, negative feedback may vary depending on the discourse and pedagogical context. Specifically, as Jessica Williams (1999) and Oliver and Mackey (2003) have shown for ESL classrooms with children and adults, respectively, more feedback is both
provided and responded to in parts of a lesson that focus on language rather than content or management.
How students respond to teacher feedback on the fly (that is, as evinced in the immediate next turn or turns) also differs remarkably across contexts, even in classrooms which at first glance fit a ‘same-context’ profile. Lyster and Mori (2006) found this to be true for classes in two immersion contexts serving fourth- and fifth-graders, one (the same investigated by Lyster and Ranta, 1997, cf. Table 4.1) involving French in Quebec, a French-speaking province of Canada, and the other involving Japanese in the United States. The relative frequency of recasts and prompts was comparable in both contexts. However, in the French immersion programme, where an orientation to content and meaning making was prevalent and the second language was available outside the classroom, students repaired after prompts much more frequently than after recasts (53 per cent vs. 38 per cent). In the Japanese immersion programme, by way of contrast, the pattern was reversed. In this classroom culture, inserted in the climate of a foreign language setting, and where choral repetitions were a familiar script for students, students were less likely to repair after prompts (23 per cent) and much more likely to repair after recasts (68 per cent). To account for this asymmetry, Lyster and Mori proposed their Counterbalance Hypothesis. In a nutshell, they predict that in contexts that put a premium on meaning making and content, negative feedback may be more effective when the transient corrective episode is more overt and explicit, thus adding salience to the focus-on-form event against the overall communication-oriented culture of the classroom. Conversely, in contexts which put a premium on accuracy and the learning of language as an object, negative feedback may be more effective when it is implemented in a more implicit fashion that preserves and capitalizes on an unusual focus on meaning, making such episodes more salient against the overall form-oriented culture of the classroom.
In the end, as we have seen, the evidence suggests that any given type of negative feedback may vary widely in explicitness, and that findings will be different depending on the interplay between at least the explicitness with which feedback is implemented and the wider classroom and societal context in which negative feedback occurs. Given the importance of implementation of feedback types and wider curricular and social context, in the near future it will be necessary to reconceptualize the all-or-nothing comparative approach that has characterized L2 research on negative feedback to date.