Introduction
Literature review
Computer-mediated communication (CMC)
CMC has been found to | Provide frequent opportunities to express ideas and opinions |
Produce a large amount of target language output | |
Allow more time to develop comments | |
Lead to greater precision of expression or greater accuracy rates | |
Promote a collaborative spirit | |
Enhance motivation of language practice | |
Promote a student-centered atmosphere | |
Reduce students’ anxiety | |
Develop students’ linguistic performance |
Corrective feedback
Correction strategy | Definition |
---|---|
Recasts | A recast is what the teacher says with the purpose of helping a student notice his or her mistakes. Teacher implicitly reformulates all or part of the student’s utterance. |
Elicitation | Elicitation is a technique by which the teacher gets the learners to give information rather than giving it to them. Teacher directly elicits a reformulation from students by asking questions. |
Explicit corrections | Teacher supplies the correct form and clearly indicates that what the student had said is incorrect. |
Repetitions from the teacher | Repetition of all or part of the utterance containing the error, often accompanied by a change in intonation |
Clarification requests | An utterance indicating a problem in comprehension, accuracy or both |
Metalinguistic feedback | Comments, information or questions that may or may not contain metalanguage but do not include the reformulation related to the ill-formedness of the utterance |
Repair moves
Successful repair moves | Definition | Non-successful repair move | Definition |
---|---|---|---|
Repetitions | A student’s repetition to the teacher’s feedback | Yes/no answer | A simple yes or no answer to the teacher’s feedback |
Incorporations | A student’s repetition of the correct form provided by the teacher | Hesitations | A student’s hesitation to the teacher’s feedback |
Self-repairs | Self-corrections | Same error | A repetition of the same error |
Peer repairs | Peer corrections provided by another student or classmate | Different error | A response to the teacher’s feedback, but including a different error |
Method
The course and the synchronous learning activities
Synchronous learning activities
Data sources
Analysis
Correction strategies | Codes |
Explicit corrections | E_C |
Recasts | R |
Elicitation | E |
Metalinguistic clues | M_L_C |
Clarification requests | C_R |
Repetitions from the teacher | R |
Repair move | Code |
Student repeats the teacher’s correction | STU_REPEAT |
Student incorporate the teacher’s correction | INCOR_TS_REF |
Student self-repairs | SELF_REP |
Student provides a yes/no response | YES_NO_REP |
Student hesitates | HESIT_REP |
Student makes the same mistake | SAME_MISTA_RE |
Student partially repairs | PART_REAP |
Results
Synchronous learning activities and the deployment of correction strategies
Relationship between correction strategies and repair moves
Perceptions of the deployment of correction strategies and repair moves
When there were errors that I identified in the recordings, I provided a general feedback, I outlined them and provided the exact correction in the next online lesson. (interview with the teacher)
In the online lessons, if they [the students] made a pronunciation or a grammar error, I explicitly corrected them and I had them repeat the correction. If they [the students] made the error again, I stopped and repeat the correction again and I had them repeat again until they got it right. (In-depth interview with the teacher)
The teacher always gives us the correct answer and she gets us repeat when we make a mistake and errors with vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar are the most common in the online lessons and the online interviews, I think. (In-depth interview to students)
What happens in the online lesson is unforeseeable and when I have to talk about unknown topics that causes me trouble and I make a lot of mistakes, but at the same time I have the chance to correct those mistakes as soon as they happen and broaden my knowledge of the language. (In-depth interview to students)
[…] the conversations (online lessons and online interviews) were a very demanding activity and in these conversations, there was immediate correction of errors and when the teacher corrected me, I immediately repeated what the teacher said trying to understand. It helped me a lot. (In-depth interview with students)
When they [the students] mispronounced a word, I didn’t interrupt them to correct them, what I did, instead, was to repeat the word or the sentence correctly. I did that not because I wanted to embarrass them, I did it as part of my speech, naturally, so they could notice where the error was. (In-depth interview with the teacher)