Metalinguistic Explanation Research Articles

The Effect of Comprehensive Written Corrective Feedback on EFL Learners’ Written Syntactic Complexity

Research background: The effectiveness of Corrective feedback has been a controversial issue and thus a central part of second language writing instruction worldwide.Gap in knowledge and Purpose of the study: It has been argued that the provision of written corrective feedback can affect the complexity of the written text negatively, and the issue is not sufficiently investigated. Therefore, this studyinvestigated the effects of two types of comprehensive written corrective feedback strategies: direct corrective feedback (DCF), and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on L2 learners’ written syntactic complexity.Methods: This study was quasi-experimental and used a pretest-intervention-posttest-delayed-posttest design. Participants were 90 Turkish EFL upper-intermediate learners, whose L2 proficiency and L2 writing skills were controlled by administering the Oxford Placement Test and the IELTS Writing Task 2 test. They were assigned to three groups: DCF, ME, and NF (i.e., no feedback on grammatical errors).The treatment/control period lasted for five weeks. Every week, each participant wrote an essay of argument-led type in class and then received the specified feedback. No work was done on writing for the two-week interval between the posttest and delayed posttest. Lu’s (2010) web-based L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyser was utilised to calculate the syntactic complexity measures. The MANOVA test was utilized to find the results.Findings and Value added: It was revealed the ME group was not significantly different from the NF group. The DCF group significantly outperformed the ME group in the clauses per sentence (C/S) of the texts both in posttests and delayed-posttests. The DCF group also significantly outperformed the NF group in the clauses per T-unit (C/T), complex T-units per T-unit (CP/T), and C/S in posttests, but the positive effect of the DCF on CP/T was not durable after the two-week interval.

Minding the gap

This study investigates how different ways of receiving peer written corrective feedback (WCF) affect learners’ opportunities to actively engage in negotiation of form in tandem virtual encounters. Two types of WCF are compared, namely direct WCF plus oral metalinguistic explanation and indirect WCF plus oral prompt. During a telecollaboration programme between Italian students of English and US students of Italian, the participants (n = 16) were given several tasks to complete in dyads, including that of providing feedback on written compositions produced by their partner in the target language. The eight dyads were divided into two groups which received the same instructions for the activities, with the exception of instructions on how to provide WCF to their partner. The data of six dyads – three from each group – were analysed with regard to the quality of language-related episodes. The data analysis showed that indirect WCF plus oral prompt was more effective in leading the NNSs to actively engage with negotiation of form during the discussion phase. This result will be discussed together with other findings which emerged from the analysis, with the aim to provide useful insights on how to promote focus on form when implementing peer-review activities in telecollaboration programmes.

The Revision Effects of Varying Degrees of Written Corrective Feedback Explicitness on L2 Learners’ Writings

This study investigated the efficacy of varying degrees of written corrective feedback (WCF) explicitness on the accuracy of revised drafts and new pieces of writing among learners of different proficiency levels. A total of 130 learners of English were divided into three proficiency groups (basic, independent, and proficient users), with learners at each proficiency level receiving four types of WCF that differed in their degree of explicitness: direct corrective feedback plus metalinguistic explanation (DCF + ME), direct corrective feedback only (DCF), indirect corrective feedback plus metalinguistic explanation (ICF + ME), and indirect corrective feedback only (ICF). Learners completed a text reconstruction task as their first draft, revised their writing according to one of the four types of WCF, and completed another text reconstruction task after 2 weeks. While the accuracy scores differed across different test times for learners at all proficiency levels, split-plot ANOVAs with post hoc comparisons showed that differential effects of varying degrees of WCF explicitness on the accuracy of learners’ revised and/or subsequent writings were found only for the proficient group where the DCF + ME group significantly outperformed the ICF group on revised drafts and both the ICF and ICF + ME groups on new pieces of writing.

The impact of corrective feedback on English articles

AbstractStudies on focused written corrective feedback in L2 contexts report that such feedback is effective, even with learners’ use of English articles. They report that by narrowly targeting two single-rule-based functions—first-mention a/an and second-mention the—learners acquire greater mastery and control over these forms. The effects of such selective corrective feedback on learners’ understanding of the complex and opaque English article system has not yet been considered in this strand of research. This classroom-based study investigates the impact of such focused corrective feedback on learners’ remaining functional article uses. The results indicate that while the focused corrective feedback leads to increased accuracy in the simple rule-based functions of articles, the same feedback may negatively impact the remaining article functions, especially for the group that received the most explicit feedback in the form of metalinguistic explanation.

TYPES OF FEEDBACK USED BY THE STUDENTS IN INTERMEDIATE WRITING CLASS

Writing is the most complicated skill among other language skills. In the writing activity, the students have to invent ideas and organize them into sentences and paragraphs that will be clear for readers. Feedback is crucial to give significant improvement to student's writings. Peers and maybe various can provide feedback. This study's objective was to describe the types of feedback used by students of the Intermediate Writing Class in writing an argumentative paragraph. Descriptive qualitative was the design of research. The subjects of this research are A1 and A4 Intermediate Writing course students of the English language Education Study Program of Lambung Mangkurat University. The data were collected through observation and document analysis. The data were then analyzed through three steps: familiarizing and organizing, coding, and interpreting and representing. The result was found that the students used several feedback types, namely written feedback as responding and written feedback as correcting. Written feedback as correcting used by the students consists of direct feedback, metalinguistic feedback, and unfocused feedback. From some of the metalinguistic feedback that some students used, they were using the grammatical description. Some of the metalinguistic feedback that some students used was the metalinguistic explanation (grammatical description). There was no metalinguistic feedback of the error code. There was only one student who used unfocused feedback. In conclusion, the students used four feedback types: written feedback as responding, written feedback as correcting, or written corrective feedback consisting of direct feedback, metalinguistic feedback, and unfocused feedback. Written feedback as responding is the feedback that the students used most while doing peer feedback. The students need to look for more information and explanation or feedback from the teachers and their friends and give feedback while doing peer feedback properly to not only use one type of feedback.

Using automated written corrective feedback in the writing classrooms: effects on L2 writing accuracy

Despite the building up of research on the adoption of automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems, the differential effects of automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) on errors with different severity levels and gains across writing tasks remain unclear. Thus, this study fills in the vacuum by examining how AWCF through Grammarly affects college students’ overall writing accuracy and errors with different severity levels. Using a quasi-experimental design, the findings demonstrate the potentials of AWCF in improving students’ writing accuracy. The results were primarily attributed to the ability of AWCF to promote noticing, provide an adaptive metalinguistic explanation, and engage students in self-directed learning. Nonetheless, some challenges were reported, such as overcorrection, cognitive overload, and limited metalinguistic explanation. Implications for writing pedagogy and future studies are discussed.

EFL Students' Preferences for Written Corrective Feedback: Do Error Types, Language Proficiency, and Foreign Language Enjoyment Matter?

Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study investigated the preference of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) for four types of written corrective feedback (WCF), which are often discussed in the literature, on grammatical, lexical, orthographic, and pragmatic errors. In particular, it concerned whether such preference is influenced by two learner variables, namely, foreign language enjoyment (FLE) and proficiency level. The preference for selective vs. comprehensive WCF was also examined. The participants in the study were 117 University students in a Thai EFL context. Analysis of questionnaire data revealed a tendency for learners to prefer more explicit types of WCF (i.e., metalinguistic explanation and overt correction) for most error types, irrespective of their proficiency and FLE level. High proficiency level learners rated less explicit WCF types (i.e., underlining and error code) as useful to some degree, whereas their low proficiency level counterparts did not. Similar results were found for the two FLE groups. Besides, the FLE level seemed to play a role in perceiving the value of WCF in terms of scope. The results of follow-up interviews showed that the linguistic features of learners' first language, existing knowledge of the target language, affective feelings, and teacher's role were the main factors contributing to variation in learners' preferences. Possible pedagogical implications are discussed.

The Impact of Error Analysis and Feedback in English Second Language Learning

This study examines written errors in a corpus of 30 compositions produced by 15 students of English as a second language (L2), whose first language (L1) is Spanish. Their ages range from 10 to 11. This paper identifies grammar errors as the most frequent due to L1’s interference in L2 learning. Positive, focused, indirect written feedback is proven to be the most effective, and the L1 seems to help the students to understand the teacher’s metalinguistic explanation to correct errors and avoid mistakes. These results provide insight into language learning given that they offer information regarding the teaching practice.

When Written Corrective Feedback Is Ineffective in Second-Language Grammar Acquisition

This paper describes an opportunity for theoretical linguists to make a particular sort of contribution to the teaching of second-language (L2) grammar. Currently, a popular procedure in L2 instruction for teaching grammar is indirect Written Corrective Feedback (WCF). In this procedure, instructors do not provide corrections but rather merely flag L2 students’ errors with proofreading symbols. These symbols are intended to guide learners to self-correct errors, and it is hoped that through this process, learners might make fewer errors in future writing with these points of grammar. Despite its widespread use, there is evidence that indirect WCF only leads to increased competence for a limited subset of grammatical patterns, exerting no significant positive effect with points of grammar not in this subset. A plausible explanation in such cases is that indirect WCF can fail to provide learners with sufficient feedback to acquire the grammatical paradigm. In such cases, direct WCF may be more helpful, but there is another option, which is to supplement indirect or direct WCF with metalinguistic explanation (ME) of targeted grammatical structures. However, the exact nature of this ME could be critical. As the view of language acquisition depicted under Skill Acquisition Theory (SAT) would predict, learners would specifically require ME that consists of accurate and concisely formulated declarative knowledge of the grammar point in a format that permits the pattern to be proceduralized and eventually automatized. Since formulating concise, accurate, and proceduralizable declarative knowledge for grammar points is a challenge in and of itself, theoretical linguists could pursue this objective and thus helpfully make a particular contribution to L2 grammar instruction. Addressing learner errors involving the articles in English is discussed as an example.

Using metalinguistic explanations to help advanced ESL/EFL learners overcome their problems with the use of English articles and reference representation

AbstractThis study reviews the difficulties that learners of English as a second or foreign language encounter in the use of English articles and puts forward some suggestions that can help advanced learners overcome their problems. It has been observed that learner performance may be deceptive and accurate article selections may be led by inappropriate assumptions, so explicit instruction is needed to enhance learners’ explicit knowledge. In the teaching of English articles, explicit analyses using metalinguistic explanations should be used to eradicate learners’ misconceptions. Their understanding of the use of different structures for showing genericity, of the distinction between definiteness and specificity, and of the differences between English articles and similar but distinct language items in their mother tongues should be strengthened. Self‐learning resources such as learners’ dictionaries can also be used to supplement teaching and learning, especially when the judgments of noun countability are at issue. It is with heightened explicit knowledge of the English article system and enhanced awareness of the use of different articles for representing different references that advanced learners will be able to master English article use competently.

Yabancı Dil Olarak İngilizce Öğretilen Ortamda Çok Taslaklı Kompozisyonlara Verilen Yazılı Düzeltici Geribildirime Öğrenci Tepkileri

This study discusses tertiary level student beliefs and reactions to written corrective feedback to multiple draft essays in an EFL setting where the students were in a process-based writing program for two semesters. As the study design, a structured survey approach was adopted. The variable tested was the effect of foreign language proficiency on student beliefs and reactions. Through convenience sampling, a total of 208 students from four different levels of foreign language proficiency took part in the study. The results showed that all proficiency groups believed in the necessity of written corrective feedback to their multiple draft essays. Yet, higher proficiency groups read more and paid a lot more attention to the teacher feedback when compared to the lower proficiency groups and all the groups asked for more written corrective feedback on grammar, lexis and structure. Lower level proficiency groups paid more attention to preliminary draft corrections. All the groups preferred to be given oral metalinguistic explanations on their multiple drafts to indirect feedback tiered through symbols. The advanced group rated their essay writing skills in a second language as good and the other groups rated themselves as adequate. The study offers implications for tertiary level academic writing instructors.

A Study Of Types Of Oral Corrective Feedback Strategies Used By Efl Teachers At Secondary Schools In Duhok City / Kurdistan Region Of Iraq

This study aims to investigate types of oral corrective feedback strategies used by EFL teachers at secondary schools in Duhok city/Kurdistan region of Iraq. It also explores teachers’ attitudes towards the use of oral corrective feedback inside classrooms based on the three variables of gender, years of teaching experience, and the type of school (public or private). For these purposes, a classroom observation checklist was designed based on Panova and Lyster’s (2002) model of study in order to confirm the types of oral corrective feedback strategies used by the teachers, to highlight learners’ errors, and to examine the learners’ response to these strategies. Besides, a closed-ended questionnaire was distributed to the teachers to explore their attitudes about the effective use of oral corrective feedback. Fifty EFL teachers from twenty-five public and private secondary schools in Duhok were asked permission to attend their classes and observe the ways they correct their learners' errors. The data obtained from classroom observations and teachers’ responses to the questionnaire were identified, analysed quantitatively. The findings revealed that EFL teachers used different types of oral corrective feedback to learners’ errors. However, the most preferred correction strategy type used by them for correcting learners’ pronunciation errors was ‘recast’, and for grammatical errors was ‘metalinguistic explanation’. As for lexical errors, the strategy used most was ‘translation’. In terms of ‘learners’ uptake’, most of the corrective feedback provided resulted in ‘Repair’. Moreover, the study found out that EFL teachers have positive attitudes towards the use of oral corrective feedback. There were also no significant differences in their responses based on the three variables of gender, years of teaching experience and the type of school.

The Effect of Comprehensive Written Corrective Feedback on EFL Learners’ Written Syntactic Accuracy

This quasi-experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest design, investigated the effects of two comprehensive corrective feedback strategies: direct corrective feedback (DCF), and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on L2 learners’ written syntactic accuracy. The participants were 90 Turkish EFL learners. After ensuring their homogeneity in terms of L2 proficiency using Oxford Quick Placement Test, they were assigned to three groups: DCF, ME, and No Feedback (NF). The treatment/control period lasted for five weeks, during which the experimental groups wrote an argumentative essay in class, received the unfocused feedback, and revised their corrected text. The participants in the NF group were provided with feedback only on content, orthography, and organization, but not on grammatical errors. Results of the posttests and delayed-posttests (after a two-week interval) revealed that both experimental groups significantly outperformed the NF group; however, no statistically significant difference was found between the DCF and ME groups. Pedagogical implications are discussed in the paper.

English language teaching and bridging in mother tongue-based multilingual education

ABSTRACT This paper shall describe the bridging strategies used by Grades 3 and 4 English teachers from schools in two regions in the Philippines to help their multilingual students transition from using the mother tongue as medium of instruction in the different subject areas to using English in the English classroom. Data were obtained through interviews, classroom observations and stimulated recall. Findings revealed that the teachers utilised different translanguaging strategies like direct translation, code-switching, metalinguistic comparison-contrast and metalinguistic explanation. These strategies used the various linguistic and semiotic resources of both students and teachers as mediating tools to allow more efficient teaching and learning and more active participation from students in the language learning activities.

Mobile-mediated dynamic assessment: A new perspective for second language development

AbstractThe present investigation analyses the potential of a pedagogical dynamic assessment (DA) approach to foster second language (L2) development through the use of a mobile instant messaging application. Students’ zone of actual and proximal development is observed through the use of a grammar and vocabulary level test and the use of the WhatsApp application respectively. Sixty students taking a B1 English course at the language centre of a Spanish university were studied. A mixed methods methodology was used to analyse the differences between two pre-existing groups (control and experimental), each consisting of 30 participants. Both groups received the same tuition and content, and students in the experimental group participated in a daily conversation in the application during a five-month period where negative feedback was provided by the teacher through the use of an inventory of prompts, from most implicit to most explicit. Throughout the research, pedagogical mobile-mediated DA became a central part of the students’ learning process, extending learning beyond the in-class time and becoming a constant source of L2 input and feedback. Moreover, results indicated that DA and dialogic mediation helped students reflect on their language performance, gradually requiring less explicit feedback and metalinguistic explanations.

Task-Based Language Teaching With a Semantic-Centred Pedagogic Grammar

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is well known for providing authentic opportunities for second and foreign language (L2) skill development. However, for many learners the use of traditional grammar within TBLT lacks the functional support necessary to create accurate and fluent L2 output. The current study replaced traditional grammar explanations with a semantic meaning-order approach to pedagogical grammar (MAP or MAP grammar) as a means to bridge the language in tasks to their function and thereby strengthen form-to-meaning understanding. The study combined TBLT and MAP grammar to look for changes in the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of 127 L2 learners’ writings. The results showed TBLT and MAP separately increased syntactic complexity, whereas the combination of the two provided gains in accuracy and fluency. This was achieved by systematically directing learners’ attention to a sequence of functional choices thereby simplifying necessary metalinguistic explanations.

How do preschool children justify the use of figurative language. Data from research with irony comprehension task

The aim of the described study was to check how preschool children justify using ironic statements. In the Irony Comprehension Task adopted for examining young children, the participants were asked to explain the use of six examples of verbal irony. There were 231 participants – 77 four-year-olds, 89 five-year-olds and 65 six-year-olds. The data revealed that with increasing age, children are more likely to indicate the duality of ironic statements. Younger children stop at noticing a dissonance between literal and intended meaning, whereas six-year-olds refer also to the inner states of the story’s main character or they introduce interesting metalinguistic explanations.

Focused written corrective feedback and linguistic target mastery: Conceptual replication of Bitchener and Knoch (2010)

AbstractThis study replicates Bitchener and Knoch (2010), which reported that written corrective feedback (WCF) targeting two single-rule English article functions (first mention a and subsequent mention the) is effective. The current replication study repeats the original study in most respects but adds to the assessment of the intervention's efficacy by recording the impact of focused WCF on all functional article uses, and not just on the two uses targeted by the WCF. The results of the replication study partially confirm Bitchener & Knoch's results and introduce some further differentiated findings. It is concluded that while the focused WCF leads to increased accuracy in the targeted functions of articles, the same WCF may negatively impact the remaining non-targeted article functions, especially for the group that received the most explicit WCF in the form of metalinguistic explanation.

The associations between working memory and the effects of four different types of written corrective feedback

Working memory has been posited to play an important role in affecting the processes of writing (Kellogg, 1996). However, to date there has been limited research on its role in second language writing and no research on whether it is associated with the effects of written corrective feedback in second language learning. This study examines the associations between two types of working memory—complex working memory and phonological short-term memory—and the effectiveness of four types of written corrective feedback: direct corrective feedback, direct corrective feedback plus revision, metalinguistic explanation, and metalinguistic explanation plus revision. Seventy-nine adult learners of English as a foreign language performed three writing tasks and took two working memory tests: a reading span test (complex working memory) and a non-word span test (phonological short-term memory). The results showed that (1) complex working memory was a positive predictor of the effects of metalinguistic explanation and the effects of direct corrective feedback plus revision, and (2) phonological short-term memory was a negative predictor of the effects of direct corrective feedback plus revision. The results suggest that the role of working memory varies as a function of feedback type and that complex working memory and phonological short-term memory may have opposite associations with the effectiveness of written feedback.

A Cognitively Designed Error Correction Log for Facilitating the Learning of Grammatical Structures

The exploratory study investigated the effectiveness of a new tool referred to as the error correction log (ECL). It was designed from a cognitive SLA perspective to facilitate learning, in the context of this study, of grammatical structures, following the receipt of written corrective feedback (WCF). The uniqueness of the ECL is that it guides learners through the cognitive processes deemed to underlie acquisition of grammatical structures, namely, noticing-the-gap (Schmidt & Frota, 1986), noticing (Schmidt, 1990, 2001) and noticing with metalinguistic understanding (Leow, 1997; Schmidt, 2001), and in the process potentially change the type of WCF available to learners. As the ECL was designed by the author, no study has investigated its effectiveness against a more established means of attending to WCF. In the case of the study presented here, the ECL was compared against studying WCF for a period of time. Utilizing a quasi-experimental design (a pre-test, treatment, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test), the treatment was a focused direct WCF plus ECL group versus a focused direct WCF plus study group. A control group received no WCF. The tests were three writing tasks; the target structure was regular past tense verbs. While the ECL group improved over time, the study group and the control group did not. The ECL group outperformed the control group in the delayed post-test, whereas the study group did not. An analysis of whether the corrected past tense verbs were subsequently used or not used in the post-tests demonstrated a lack of correct use for the ECL group; this, with an analysis of the ECLs for the provision of a metalinguistic explanation, suggest learners may have been able to change direct WCF (potential noticing) to direct WCF plus metalinguistic explanation (potential noticing plus metalinguistic understanding) leading to the suggestion these learners likely drew on the corrected verbs, their preexisting vocabulary-learned knowledge and preexisting metalinguistic knowledge (implicitly and explicitly acquired) when completing the delayed post-test. These results will be discussed in relation to research, theory and practice.