A classroom research study on use of oral corrective feedback at an EFL university

Abstract

This study aims to investigate which types of errors lead to which types of corrective feedback and their distribution in university preparatory school speaking classes. Discourse analytic principles were used to analyze the learners' errors and types of oral corrective feedback in communicatively oriented speaking classes. The frequency and distribution of error types and corrective feedback are examined. Three instructors teaching English speaking courses at B1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in different classes participated in the study. The data, consisting of six videotaped lessons, were transcribed for coding and analysis according to the system proposed by Lyster and Ranta (1997). First, four error types and seven types of corrective feedback were coded and then, the relationship between the feedback type and error type was examined. The results showed that the most commonly used feedback type is recast. This is followed by a translation and explicit correction. Metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, clarification requests, and repetitions are not common feedback types. Looking at the relationship between the type of corrective feedback and the type of error, grammatical errors were the most common type, but were corrected the least. On the other hand, lexical errors were the least frequent but were the most frequently corrected error type.