Page 152 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Inside the Language Classroom

Table 9.4 Types of Feedback with Examples
Type of feedback Examples
Explicit correction. The teacher says what is P: She have got two brothers.
wrong and provides the correct form. T: No, this is wrong. She has got two brothers.
Recast. The teacher reformulates the sentence P: She have got two brothers.
without the error. T: So Ann has got two brothers? She has got
two brothers.
Clarification request. The teacher checks poten- P: She have got two brothers.
tial misunderstanding by asking the student to T: Areyou sure shehas gottwo brothers?
repeat part of the utterance.
Metalinguistic feedback. The teacher uses com- P: She have got two brothers.
ments or questions related to some grammati- T: What’s the ending we put on verbs with ‘he’
cal rule without explicitly providing the correct and ‘she’?
form, sometimes also resorting to grammatical
terminology.
Elicitation. The teacher tries to directly elicit P: She have got two brothers.
the correct form from the student, for exam- T: She ...
ple by deliberately pausing to allow students
to ‘fill in the blank’ or asking questions.
Repetition. The teacher repeats the students’ P: She have got two brothers.
utterance in a correct way, often highlighting T: She HAVE got two brothers?
the error by using a particular intonation.
Notes Adapted from Lyster and Ranta (1997).

negotiating for meaning can help learners notice their errors and improve
the inaccurate forms themselves.
Ellis (2009b) points out that there are a number of questions related to
the use of corrective feedback, such as which strategy is the most efficient,
which type of errors should be corrected, when they should be corrected,
and whether they should be corrected at all. These issues reflect different
approaches to teaching a FL which in turn point to different attitudes to mis-
takes in the FL classroom. In the spirit of the audiolingual approach, for ex-
ample, mistakes should be avoided as they result in bad habits which means
that there is little space for corrective feedback. On the other hand, humanis-
tic approaches advocate mistake-friendly environments which promote pos-
itive assessment and the learners’ self-image. According to Ellis (2009a), there
is today a general agreement among researchers that corrective feedback
does assist language acquisition and that the question we should ask is not
whether to correct or not to correct but rather which corrective feedback
strategies are the most efficient in a given situation.

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