Effectiveness oof repetition for error correction

Effectiveness of recast and repetition for error correction or feedback.

Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of repetition and recast as corrective feedback or correction, 15 students were observed in two classes, the first class in which the teacher worked as usual and the second class in which the teacher used on purpose recast and repetition. I took notes during bothclasses of some feedback teacher gave to students, and these were transcribed and analyzed. Also students answered a grammar test created based what students had problems with error correction, then the test results of the two classes were compared. The results revealed that the second class, which was exposed to repetition as corrective feedback, achieved higher scores than the first class. Thefindings of the study indicated that repetition as a correction technique is effective in terms of its contribution to uptake and acquisition.

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Effectiveness of recast and repetition for error correction or feedback.

EFFECTIVENESS OF RECASTS AND REPETITION FOR ERROR CORRECTION INTRODUCTION A large body of work in discourse analysis (especially Johnstone, Repetition in Discourse) has shedlight into the multifaceted and pervasive presence of repetitions in institutional and non-institutional discourse. From a formal point of view it has been argued, for example, that far from being trivial linguistic resources, repetitions contain features normally attributed to literary discourse. From a functional standpoint, it is now known that repetitions not only convey referential meanings, butalso, and often simultaneously, play a central role in the establishment of relationships among interactants (Heath; Kasper; Tannen 1989). In addition repetitions are also an strategy employed by teachers when teaching a second language, some persons says that repetition is the key to success when learning another language. The goal of this paper is to investigate if repetitions and recast areeffective applied to error correction or corrective feedback when learning a second language; in this case English. The students are Spanish native speakers, and the data consists of classes observed by me with their respective notes of the classes. The students are in the age between 16 and 18 years old, all of them are pre intermediate students. In the next section I provide an overview of keytheoretical and empirical investigations about repetition.

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Effectiveness of recast and repetition for error correction or feedback.

Theoretical Framework

Corrective feedback is described by Lightbown and Spada (2003) as ―an indication to a learner that his or her use of the target language is incorrect.‖(p.172), and it falls into two categories, explicit or implicit, depending on theway the errors are corrected. Explicit feedback, as Kim and Mathes (2001) stated in their article, refers to the explicit provision of the correct form, including specific grammatical information that students can refer to when an answer is incorrect, whereas implicit feedback, such as elicitation, repetition, clarification requests, recasts and metalinguistic feedback (Lochtman, 2002), allowslearners to notice the error and correct it with the help of the teacher. Uptake, as Lyster and Ranta (1997) define, is ―a student‟s utterance that immediately follows the teacher‟s feedback and that constitutes a reaction in some way to the teacher‟s intention to draw attention to some aspect of the student‟s initial utterance‖ (p. 49). On the other hand, talking about repetition; Johnstone (―Anintroduction‖) goes on to argue that all discourse is in fact structured by repetition (212). Repetitions have been traditionally looked at from a literary perspective: in this type of discourse, repetition can be used to create certain effects—in poetry, for example, we often find sounds, words, or strings repeated, each type of repetition conveying a different kind of message or image to the...