WATCH THEIR LANGUAGE: FEEDBACK PROVISION VIA AUDIO-VISUAL RECORDINGS

Abstract

In their attempt to learn a foreign language, learners make errors. Providing a feedback on this erroneous language output presents a multilevel dilemma. First, teachers must decide whether or not to respond. Second, if feedback is ever desperately required, who should do it and how should it be done? More important, overwhelmed by the sheer number of beginner and intermediate-level learners’ errors, keeping a record and making notes of the important errors during interpersonal conversation such as role plays poses a serious challenge. Equally important, teachers are more inclined to interrupt constantly the flow of learners’ conversation to provide corrective feedback, a practice that much dampens their enthusiasm to express themselves. In response, the current paper addresses two main questions: which teaching technique could teachers devise to organize their corrective feedback provision? Which technology toolkit could be brought into classroom use to help organize corrective feedback provision to learners’ oral flawed output? The paper draws on the experimental use of audiovisual recordings of learners’ oral output for the purpose of providing more adequate corrective feedback. With one objective in mind, the experiment is aimed to test the utility of using audiovisual recording to improve the quality of corrective feedback provision. Audiovisual recordings provide useful database for teachers to organize any remedial intervention and feedback provision. Moreover, the recordings will, in the long term, constitute a corpus that could be well exploited to build an explanatory theory for learners’ errors.