Effective Corrective Feedback Strategies for ESL Learners
Corrective Feedback (CF) Techniques for ESL Learners
1. Direct Corrective Feedback
The teacher provides the student with the correct form by crossing out an unnecessary word, phrase, or morpheme, inserting a missing word or morpheme, and writing the correct form above or near the erroneous form.
Advantages:
- Provides learners with explicit guidance on error correction.
- More effective than indirect CF for low-proficiency learners.
Disadvantages:
- Requires minimal processing from the learner, potentially hindering long-term learning.
2. Indirect Corrective Feedback
The teacher indicates an error without explicitly correcting it, using methods like underlining, cursors, or marginal crosses.
Advantages:
- Encourages guided learning and problem-solving.
- Promotes reflection on linguistic forms and long-term learning.
Disadvantages:
- Less effective than indicated and located errors compared to marginal checks.
3. Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback
Provides explicit comments on the nature of errors, often using error codes or metalinguistic explanations.
a) Error Codes:
Abbreviated labels for different error types, placed above the error or in the margin. Debate exists on the level of detail for error categories (e.g., general “articles” vs. specific “definite/indefinite articles”).
Limited evidence supports the long-term effectiveness of error codes compared to other CF types.
b) Metalinguistic Explanations:
Provides explanations of the error’s nature. Less common due to time constraints and the teacher’s required metalinguistic knowledge. Shown to be effective for improving article usage in immediate subsequent writing.
4. Focused vs. Unfocused Corrective Feedback
Teachers can choose to correct all errors (unfocused) or specific error types (focused).
a) Focused CF:
Especially helpful with metalinguistic feedback, promoting attention and understanding of the error. May be more effective for short-term acquisition of specific features.
b) Unfocused CF:
Addresses a broader range of errors, potentially leading to superior long-term improvement.
5. Electronic Feedback
Utilizes software programs and corpora of written English to provide assistance during writing or as feedback.
Allows learners to learn from the usage of more experienced writers.
Example: Mark My Words
Provides an electronic store of common lexico-grammatical and style errors, offering a usage-based approach to error correction and potentially more reliable than relying solely on teacher intuition.
6. Reformulation
Provides learners with resources to correct errors while leaving the final decision and method of correction to the student.
Requires constructing a native-speaker version of the erroneous text segment to identify the error.
Effectiveness:
Ferris (2006) found that 80.4% of errors were corrected through various methods (correction, deletion, substitution), while 9.9% were incorrectly revised and 9.9% remained unchanged.
Student Revision Analysis Categories (Ferris 2006):
- **Error Corrected:** Corrected as per teacher’s marking.
- **Incorrect Change:** Change made but incorrect.
- **No Change:** No response to the correction.
- **Deleted Text:** Marked text deleted instead of correction.
- **Substitution, Correct:** Student-invented correction not suggested by the teacher.
- **Substitution, Incorrect:** Incorrect student-made change not suggested by the teacher.
- **Teacher-Induced Error:** Incomplete or misleading teacher marking causing student error.
- **Averted Erroneous:** Student corrected error despite incomplete or erroneous teacher marking.