Page 151 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Corrective Feedback

Classroom Insight: Where is the Mouse?
When she has to give complex instructions it would be too difficult for her pupils to fol-
in the first grade, Mia often decides to do the low the instructions in English, even with
activity at class level first. Rather than giving gestures and other scaffolding involved, so
the instructions to pupils on how to carry out she always plays this game with the whole
the activity, they do it together first and then class first. Using pictures of houses with mag-
she just says ‘Now you do it in pairs.’ For ex- nets on the board, she plays the game asking
ample, in the activity ‘Where is the mouse?’, the pupils to put their hands over their eyes
the pupils play a game in which they have when she hides the mouse behind a house.
to guess in which house the mouse is hid- Then she encourages them to repeat with
ing. They have pictures of houses of different her the communication pattern ‘Where is the
colours and a drawing of a little mouse. One mouse?’ – ‘The mouse is in the house.’ several
pupil hides the mouse under the picture of times, using rhythm and clapping. When the
a house and asks: Where is the mouse? And class game is over, she gives them instruc-
his/her partner tries to guess ‘The mouse is in tions (with gestures) to play the same game
the red/blue/yellow house.’ Mia feels that in pairs. And they always know what to do.

(Ellis, 2009; Mackey & Oliver, 2002; Lyster & Ranta, 1997). While most studies
focused primarily on corrective feedback with older children and adult lan-
guage learners, Mackey and Oliver (2002) and Lyster and Ranta (1997) showed
that feedback on errors can also be efficient with young (albeit not very
young) learners.

Spoken Feedback
Lyster and Ranta (1997) have identified six different types of feedback by
teachers to students: explicit correction, recasts, clarification requests, met-
alinguistic feedback, elicitation and repetition (Table 9.4 on p. 152).
Another category, paralinguistic signal, was later added by Lyster et al.
(2013). It refers to a corrective strategy in which the teacher uses a gesture
or facial expression to indicate that the learner has made an error. For the ex-
ample in Table 9.4, the teacher might point his/her finger at a third person to
indicate that the form changes with number.
In a well-known study conducted by Lyster and Ranta (1997) with fourth
and fifth graders learning English as a foreign language, the most used cor-
rective technique by teachers were recasts which, however, turned out to be
the least effective as they accounted for merely 31 of success in the cor-
rect use of learners. The most effective method in generating an accurate
students’ response to feedback was elicitation, with a 100 success rate in
eliciting student-generated repair. One possible explanation for this is that
YLs may not be able to notice recasts and recognize them as feedback while

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