Retrospective Verbal Reports Research Articles

Exploring learner engagement with written corrective feedback in a Chinese tertiary EFL classroom

While many studies have examined the impact of written corrective feedback (WCF) on L2 learners’ subsequent writing, learner engagement with WCF has been under-conceptualized and under-explored: Not only has the term “learner engagement” been often used without being clearly defined, but few studies have sought to investigate this aspect. Informed by Ellis's ((2010) Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 335–349) multiple-dimensional perspective on learner engagement with corrective feedback, this paper reports on a naturalistic case study involving four non-English major Chinese EFL learners which was conducted to explore how learners cognitively, behaviorally, and affectively engage with WCF. Data collected from multiple sources, including learners’ written texts, interviews, retrospective verbal reports, and teacher–student writing conferences show the complexity of learner engagement within and across the cognitive, the behavioral, and the affective dimensions. Also prominent in the data are individual differences in learner engagement with WCF, which may be attributed partly to learners’ beliefs and experiences about WCF and L2 writing, their L2 learning goals, and to the interactional context in which WCF was received and processed. Findings suggest that teachers need to have a thorough understanding of students’ backgrounds and beliefs and that they should carefully plan their WCF strategies to enhance students’ engagement with WCF.

External-Focus Feedback Benefits Free-Throw Learning in Children

Purpose: Considerable research supports the motor-learning advantage associated with an external focus of attention; however, very few studies have attempted to generalize these findings to children especially with attentional focus feedback. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of attentional focus feedback on motor learning in children. Method: Boys (n = 14) and girls (n = 14) aged 9 to 11 years old were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 gender-stratified groups: (a) internal-focus feedback or (b) external-focus feedback. Following initial instructions and task demonstration, participants performed 100 modified free throws over 2 days while receiving feedback statements respective to their attentional focus condition. Approximately 24 hr later, participants performed a retention test consisting of 20 additional free throws. Participants were also asked to respond to a retrospective verbal report at the end of each day to serve as a manipulation check. Results: Results of the analysis revealed a statistically significant learning advantage for participants receiving external-focus feedback, and retrospective verbal reports provide support for the self-invoking trigger and constrained action hypotheses. Conclusions: Future research should continue to incorporate retrospective verbal reports and explore potential causal links between internal attentional focus and self-evaluation.

Implicit and explicit knowledge of inflectional morphology

ABSTRACTThis study set out to test the degree to which second language inflectional morphology can be acquired as a result of incidental exposure and whether the resulting knowledge is implicit (unconscious) or explicit (conscious) in nature. Participants were exposed to an artificial language system based on Czech morphology under incidental learning conditions. In the testing phase, a grammaticality judgment test was utilized to assess learning. In addition, subjective measures of awareness and retrospective verbal reports were used to measure whether the acquired knowledge was conscious or not. The results of the experiment indicate that participants can rapidly develop knowledge of second language inflectional morphology under incidental learning conditions in the absence of verbalizable rule knowledge.

Individual differences in competent consumer choice: the role of cognitive reflection and numeracy skills.

In this paper, we investigate whether cognitive reflection and numeracy skills affect the quality of the consumers’ decision-making process in a purchase decision context. In a first (field) experiment, an identical product was on sale in two shops with different initial prices and discounts. One of the two deals was better than the other and the consumers were asked to choose the best one and to describe which arithmetic operations they used to solve the problem; then they were asked to complete the numeracy scale (Lipkus et al., 2001). The choice procedures used by the consumers were classified as “complete decision approach” when all the arithmetic operations needed to solve the problem were computed, and as “partial decision approach” when only some operations were computed. A mediation model shows that higher numeracy is associated with use of the complete decision approach. In turn, this approach is positively associated with the quality of the purchase decision. Given that these findings highlight the importance of the decision processes, in a second (laboratory) experiment we used a supplementary method to study the type of information search used by the participants: eye-tracking. In this experiment the participants were presented with decision problems similar to those used in Experiment 1 and they completed the Lipkus numeracy scale and the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005). Participants with a high CRT score chose the best deal more frequently, and showed a more profound and detailed information search pattern compared to participants with a low CRT score. Overall, results indicate that higher levels of cognitive reflection and numeracy skills predict the use of a more thorough decision process (measured with two different techniques: retrospective verbal reports and eye movements). In both experiments the decision process is a crucial factor which greatly affects the quality of the purchase decision.

Chinese learners' cognitive processes in writing email requests to faculty

Abstract For the past decades, cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics have focused on native and non-native speech act descriptions, and only a small number of studies have investigated the cognitive processes involved in speech act productions. To bridge the gap, the present study examined the cognitive processes of L2 learners engaged in an email task involving two requests to faculty. Concurrent and retrospective verbal reports were collected from 15 pairs of intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners and were analyzed in terms of intention, cognition, planning and evaluation . The analysis identified that when responding to the email task, the learners adopted various politeness strategies to express their requestive intentions, and focused their attention on lexical, grammatical and situational features of the task. In addition, the learners planned their emails systematically in the order of Greeting, Message and Closing, and evaluated their performances in terms of degree of politeness and the persuasiveness of their reasons. This study concludes with suggestions for future research and pedagogy.

TRIANGULATING MEASURES OF AWARENESS

Williams’s (2005) study on “learning without awareness” and three subsequent extensions (Faretta-Stutenberg & Morgan-Short, 2011; Hama & Leow, 2010; Rebuschat, Hamrick, Sachs, Riestenberg, & Ziegler, 2013) have reported conflicting results, perhaps in part due to differences in how awareness has been measured. The present extension of Williams (2005) addresses this possibility directly by triangulating data from three awareness measures: concurrent verbal reports (think-aloud protocols), retrospective verbal reports (postexposure interviews), and subjective measures (confidence ratings and source attributions). Participants were exposed to an artificial determiner system under incidental learning conditions. One experimental group thought aloud during training, another thought aloud during training and testing, and a third remained silent, as did a trained control group. All participants were then tested by means of a forced-choice task to establish whether learning took place. In addition, all participants provided confidence ratings and source attributions on test items and were interviewed following the test. Our results indicate that, although all experimental groups displayed learning effects, only the silent group was able to generalize the acquired knowledge to novel instances. Comparisons of concurrent and retrospective verbal report data shed light on the conflicting findings previously reported in the literature and highlight important methodological issues in implicit and explicit learning research.

Use of Cognitive Task Analysis to Probe Option-Generation in Law Enforcement

Option-generation paradigms have been employed successfully to investigate skill-based differences in performance, particularly in complex, dynamic, and/or uncertain domains. However, although knowledge of option-generation behavior (e.g., number of options generated, frequency with which the criterion best option is selected) is informative, the underlying basis for the observed option-generation behavior is not always apparent. To address this issue, we probed option-generation behavior using cognitive task analysis. Experienced and less-experienced law enforcement officers first observed temporally-occluded video simulations, and then completed an option-generation task. The cognitive task analysis comprised elicitation of retrospective verbal reports of thinking, followed by video-stimulated recall; analysis of these data revealed information that potentially explains the observed option-generation behavior and provided information relevant to the design of decision-making training.

English

A growing body of research has been investigating how L2 writers, while writing in the second language (L2), make use of their first language (L1). In view of this, the present study was conducted to examine the effect of translation on the enhancement or deterioration of Iranian Elementary EFL learners’ writing ability. The participants (N = 60) were prompted to perform two writing tasks: (a) writing directly in English (learners’ L2) and (b) writing in their L1 (Persian) and then translating it into English. They were also assigned a checklist, a retrospective verbal report, to express their attitudes towards the two modes of writing. Analysis of the results revealed that although translation may be of help to some learners, it cannot be an effective strategy to enhance the writing ability of all learners. In effect, the results indicated that there was a significant difference between two writing tasks in terms of using expressions, transitions, and grammatical points. What was of particular interest to the authors was the fact that direct writing did not seem to be as direct as it was expected. The vast majority (75%) of students reported they think in Persian, as “often” or “always” while doing the English task in the direct writing mode. This finding suggests that teachers should incorporate translation strategies into their writing courses and explicitly teach students how to employ effective strategies in different situations. The provision of instruction and practice in using L1, particularly in planning and organizing learners’ writings, may be of benefit to some learners in performing certain writing tasks. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/GEMA-2014-1402-05

A A Design Approach to the Study of People's Experiences with Technologies in the Context of Public Transport

Relevant to the study of people’s attitudes towards public transport use is the consideration to the role of technology as part of the travel experience. Technologies aim to enhance daily tasks but tend to change the way people interact with products and can be perceived as difficult to use. This is critical in the context of “public use” where products and services are to be used by the population at large: adults, children, elderly, people with disabilities, and tourists. From different perspectives, the topic of users and the use of technologies have been studied in the social sciences and human computer interaction fields; however, earlier approaches fail to address the ways in which experiential knowledge informs people’s interactions with products and technologies, and how such information could guide the design of future technologies. This paper describes a pilot study, part of a larger ongoing exploratory research that investigates people’s experiences with infrastructure, systems, and technologies in the context of public transport. The methodological approach included focus groups, field observations, and retrospective verbal reports. At this stage, the study found that four context led factors were the primary source of reference informing participants’ actions and interactions; they are: (i) context >> experience, (ii) context >> interface, (iii) context >> knowledge, (iv) context >> emotion.

Skill-Based Differences In Visual Search Behaviours And Verbal Reports In A Representative Film-Based Task In Volleyball

A desire to increase understanding of the mechanisms underpinning expert performance has motivated a large body of research. We examined the processes supporting skilled performance in a complex film-based volleyball task using a representative simulated environment. Participants were presented a complex, game-like volleyball task. We combined eye movement recording with immediate retrospective verbal reports of thinking in fifteen elite female volleyball players, ranked into skilled and less skilled groups. Skilled players employed longer fixations than their less skilled counterparts, and spent a greater amount of time fixating the receiver and functional spaces between two or more players. Skilled participants generated significantly more condition concepts, and presented a superior level of sophistication in their verbal reports. Data suggests that it is relevant to use tasks that simulate real-life environments. The definition of functional spaces, aiming for locations that stimulate retrieving information from more than one cue at a time, affords researchers to use eye-tracking devices to analyze peripheral vision. Based on collection of verbal reports researchers could assess if those functional spaces were relevant for the subjects. Researchers need to be thoughtful when designing representative tasks in order to accurately simulate competitive contexts.

A Longitudinal Investigation into L2 Learners’ Cognitive Processes during Study Abroad

The present study longitudinally investigates the cognitive processes of advanced L2 learners engaged in a multimedia task that elicited status-equal and status-unequal refusals in English during their study abroad. Data were collected three times by retrospective verbal report from 20 Chinese learners who were studying abroad over the course of one academic year. The results revealed that the learners reported paying increasingly more attention to sociopragmatics in context when they responded to each situation of the task. Furthermore, the study showed the effect of study abroad on the learners' perceptions of the factors affecting their pragmatic productions across the three phases. These effects were reflected by the decrease in pragmatic difficulties and the increase in pragmatic knowledge reported by the learners. This article demonstrates that using the retrospective verbal report at different points during learners' study abroad allows the examination of the changes in the cognitive processes involved in L2 pragmatic production.

Effects of Prolonged Intermittent Exercise on Perceptual-Cognitive Processes

The visual search behaviors and thought processes underpinning anticipation and how these are influenced by intermittent exercise were examined in high- and low-level soccer players. High-level (n = 8) and low-level (n = 8) players completed a soccer-specific, intermittent exercise protocol that simulated the demands of a match while responding to filmed sequences of offensive play. HR, blood lactate concentrations, anticipation performance, visual search behaviors, and immediate retrospective verbal reports were assessed. High-level players demonstrated superior anticipation compared with low-level counterparts, but both groups showed reduced accuracy across the exercise protocol. Mean HR and blood lactate values increased significantly from the beginning to the end of each half of the match (P < 0.05). Visual search data revealed significant group-test session interactions for the number of locations (P < 0.0001), mean fixation durations (P = 0.003), and number of fixations (P < 0.0001). When compared with low-level participants, high-level players used more fixations of shorter duration to more locations at the beginning of each half; whereas at the end of the exercise protocol, they used fewer fixations of longer duration to a lower number of locations. There was a significant group-type of statement-test session interaction (P = 0.001) for the verbal report data. High-level participants generated a great number of evaluation, prediction (in the beginning of the second half), and deep planning statements (during the first and the last test sessions). In contrast, low-level players used more superficial cognition statements than high-level individuals in both halves. The intermittent exercise induced changes in perceptual-cognitive processes in both groups, although high-level players exhibited superior anticipation across test sessions accompanied by more effective search behaviors and elaborate thought processes.

Capturing and testing perceptual-cognitive expertise: A comparison of stationary and movement response methods

Numerous methods have been used to study expertise and performance. In the present article, we compare the cognitive thought processes of skilled soccer players when responding to film-based simulations of defensive situations involving two different experimental conditions. Participants either remained stationary in a seated position (n = 10) or were allowed to move (n = 10) in response to life-size film sequences of 11 versus 11 open-play soccer situations viewed from a player's perspective. Response accuracy and retrospective verbal reports of thinking were collected across the two task conditions. In the movement-based response group, participants generated a greater number of verbal report statements, including a higher proportion of evaluation, prediction, and action planning statements, than did participants in the stationary group. Findings suggest that the processing strategies employed during performance differ depending on the nature of the response required of participants. Implications for behavioral methods and experimental design are discussed.

Measuring Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Research

This article reviews three types of measures which have been widely used in psychological research to assess the conscious or unconscious status of knowledge: retrospective verbal reports, direct and indirect tests, and subjective measures. The goal is to make these techniques available to a wide audience of second language (L2) researchers and to offer suggestions for their sound use in order to promote the study of implicit L2 learning. Each section begins with a brief definition of what it means to have acquired unconscious (implicit) knowledge according to the measure in question. This is followed by a description of representative studies that illustrate how the technique has been used and by a discussion of its limitations. Each section concludes with specific guidelines on how to apply the respective measure to the investigation of implicit and explicit L2 learning.

The influence of social situations on fluency difficulty in Korean EFL learners’ oral refusals

This study investigated fluency difficulty in Korean EFL learners’ refusals by examining the impact of social factors such as power and social distance on measures of processing speed and appropriateness. 40 Korean learners of English at two different proficiency levels produced refusals of request in a role play task in six social situations. Immediately after the role play task, retrospective verbal reports were elicited in order to examine the participants’ perceptions of task difficulty. Results show that the factors of power and proficiency had a significant effect on both appropriateness scores and production speed in Korean EFL learners’ production of refusals. Refusals of requests from persons of lower status were more difficult to produce and required a longer production time for learners than did refusals in power-high and power-equal situations, and the lower proficiency group had more difficulty in producing refusals than the higher proficiency group. It is suggested that learners’ fluency difficulty results from a combination of cognitive and socio-linguistic factors, particularly (i) their familiarity with situations, (ii) sensitivity to maintaining self-face and (iii) the level of politeness and complexity of the appropriate expressions required in a particular social situation.

First- and second-order reactivity to verbal protocols: an example from a study on strategy variability

Verbal reports are a common method of data collection in studies of mathematics learning, often in studies with a longitudinal component or those employing microgenetic methods where several observations of problem-solving are made over a short period of time. Whilst there is a fairly substantial literature on reactivity to verbal reports, addressing concerns that the production of verbal reports will change the behaviour that participants are reporting on, little of this literature addresses the question of how verbal reports might affect subsequent trials (what we would like to call second-order reactivity). In order to address the issues of both first- and second-order reactivity, ninety-nine 14-year-old participants were asked to provide answers to a set of six questions on two occasions, one week apart. Fifty-eight participants were asked for written answers and explanations, while 41 participants were asked for both concurrent and retrospective verbal reports. The results show evidence for both first- and second-order reactivity. The distribution of strategies employed in the first session was different for the two conditions and there were some interesting differences in patterns of strategy selection across the two sessions. These findings have some important implications for the use of verbal reports over multiple trials.

Identifying the processes underpinning anticipation and decision-making in a dynamic time-constrained task

A novel, representative task was used to examine skill-based differences in the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying performance on a dynamic, externally paced task. Skilled and less skilled soccer players were required to move and interact with life-size, action sequences involving 11 versus 11 soccer situations filmed from the perspective of a central defender in soccer. The ability of participants to anticipate the intentions of their opponents and to make decisions about how they should respond was measured across two separate experiments. In Experiment 1, visual search behaviors were examined using an eye-movement registration system. In Experiment 2, retrospective verbal reports of thinking were gathered from a new sample of skilled and less skilled participants. Skilled participants were more accurate than less skilled participants at anticipating the intentions of opponents and in deciding on an appropriate course of action. The skilled players employed a search strategy involving more fixations of shorter duration in a different sequential order and toward more disparate and informative locations in the display when compared with the less skilled counterparts. The skilled players generated a greater number of verbal report statements with a higher proportion of evaluation, prediction, and planning statements than the less skilled players, suggesting they employed more complex domain-specific memory representations to solve the task. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.

Mechanisms underlying skilled anticipation and recognition in a dynamic and temporally constrained domain

We examined the mechanisms underlying skilled anticipation and recognition in a dynamic, interactive, and temporally constrained domain. Skilled and less-skilled participants viewed dynamic film stimuli, anticipated event outcome, and provided immediate retrospective verbal reports. Previously viewed and novel sequences were then presented in film or point-light display format. Participants made recognition judgements and again gave retrospective verbal reports on their thought processes. Skilled participants demonstrated superior anticipation accuracy and were more sensitive in distinguishing previously seen from novel stimuli than less-skilled participants. Skilled participants utilised more complex memory representations than less-skilled individuals, as indicated by references in their retrospective reports to more evaluation and prediction statements. The representations activated during anticipation were more complex than those for recognition judgements in both groups. Findings are discussed with reference to long-term working memory theory.

Event-sequence Analysis of Appraisals and Coping during Trapshooting Performance

This study describes appraisal and coping patterns of Portuguese trapshooters during competition, via post-performance retrospective verbal reports. Probabilities that an event (e.g., missed target) is followed by another event (e.g., negative appraisal) were calculated and state transitional diagrams were drawn. Event-sequences during critical and non-critical performance periods were compared. Negative appraisals were most likely before and after missed targets and hits with the second shot. Positive appraisals were most likely before problem-focused coping and after emotion-focused coping. These findings support the process view of coping by illustrating that athletes cope with a variety of situations via a complex set of appraisals.

What lies beneath?: Verbal report in interlanguage requests in English

The present study investigates the role of concurrent and retrospective verbal report in exploring the cognitive processes of six pairs of advanced ESL learners engaged on a written discourse completion task eliciting status-unequal requests in English. Qualitative analysis of the concurrent data indicate that (i) social contextual aspects of the discourse situation influenced pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic choices in the planning phase and (ii) language-related episodes (Swain & Lapkin 1995, 2001, Storch 2008) evidenced participants' negotiation of lexical and grammatical choices in planning the requests. Metalinguistic data from the retrospective interviews indicate that (i) participants thought in both L1 & L2: there was evidence that L1 was employed in planning the organisation of dis- course and in lexical search strategies, and (ii) participants experienced difficulty with the methodological requirement of a one-turn response in the written task and in recalling their linguistic hypotheses in the concurrent phase. The paper suggests that combining a form of paired verbal report with a written elicitation instrument in interlanguage pragmatics research may provide insights into the cognitive processes underlying the sociocultural and sociolinguistic choices in advanced L2 learners' written speech act production and could be used more extensively in such research.