I’ve come across a few posts on written error correction recently. ELT research Bites took on the topic in a two part post (2) and earlier in the year Gianfranco Conti (PhD applied linguistics, MA TEFL, MA English lit, PGCE modern languages an P.E.) wrote one. Conti claims that marking students books should be the ‘least of a language teacher’s priorities‘ but is he right?
I intend to answer this question by drawing on thirty years of error-correction research, my personal experience as a learner of 14 languages and teacher of five and, more importantly, neuroscience and common sense.
Now, references don’t have best before dates, and to this day E still equals MC squared. That said, the age of Conti’s references does present an issue in this case. For instance, Dana Ferris, possibly the world’s leading expert on written corrective feedback (WCF) is only mentioned in relation to a 1999 paper. She has, since then, written extensively on the subject including three books (Response to student Writing 2003, treatment of error in second language 2002, 2011, and with Bitchener, Written Corrective Feedback 2012). None of these are mentioned in the section called “What L2 error-correction research says”.
What’s more, the research findings show a distinct change in the period Conti leaves out. For instance, Ellis and Shintani note that whereas in 1996 it was possible for Truscott to argue that the effectiveness of WCF could not be supported, this position is no longer tenable (2013:271). And as if spookily preempting Conti, Ferris, in a ‘state of the art’ paper from 2004 notes that ‘since 1999, I have done a considerable amount of both primary and secondary research work on the issues surrounding error correction in L2 writing‘ (2004:50).
A lot is missed if we miss out the last 15 years of research. In a recent meta-analysis looking at WCF, of the 21 studies that met the inclusion criteria, only four were published before 2004. Conti’s post does not include any of the 17 remaining studies. This is important as the research design of ‘early (pre-Truscott, 1996) studies‘ contained design and execution flaws (Bitchener and Ferris 2012:50) perhaps indicating why ‘studies published after the year 2000 showed a significantly higher effect size…than that of the studies published before 2000‘ (Kang and Han 2015:99).
So what does the research say about corrective feedback?
It isn’t clear from his post, but Conti may be talking about lower level students. As Schmidt notes on the ELT research bytes webpage, the Kang and Han meta Analysis found that ‘[WCF’s] efficacy is mediated by a host of variables, including learners’ proficiency, the setting, and the genre of the writing task‘ (2015). Notably, Kang and Han’s analysis suggests WCF is less beneficial among lower level learners.
And what type of feedback is best?
Direct or indirect?
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direct* |
Direct correction, that is telling the students exactly what is wrong, and what they ought to write, ‘is more effective than indirect’ and direct feedback alone ‘resulted in gains in grammatical accuracy’ (Ellis and Shintani 2014:271). According to Shintani and Ellis ‘Bitchener and Knoch (2010), Hashemnezhad and Mohammadnejad (2012) and Frear (2012) all reported direct feedback to be more effective than indirect’ (2015:111) In older studies no difference was detected, or indirect CF appeared superior (Ferris 2011:32) but ‘recent studies report a clear advantage for direct forms of feedback.’ (Bitchener and Ferris 2012:74). As an interesting side note, teaching guides tend to promote indirect feedback (Ellis and Shintani’s 2014:279).
In conclusion, we can say fairly confidently that feedback of some kind is, in most cases, better than no feedback. Research suggests that even a ‘single treatment’, particularly if focused on a grammar point with a clear rule, is effective. (Ellis and Shintani 2014:271).
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indirect coded |
Coded or uncoded?
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indirect uncoded |
Interestingly, there is no evidence that coded feedback is superior to uncoded (Ferris 2011:34). Both teachers and students, however, believe that coded feedback is more effective. (Ferris and Bitchener 2012:93) and there is some research supporting the idea that meta-linguistics explanations make feedback more effective (Ferris 2011:100).
So the jury is seemingly out on focused vs unfocused WFC. However, whereas a study that compared focused and unfocused feedback found no difference between the two (Ellis et al., 2008) both were superior to the ‘no feedback’ group. A finding which seems to contradict Conti’s bold statement.
Conclusion
*I realise ‘I like dogs and I like cats’ isn’t a great sentence.