Corrective Feedback

Roberts (1995) conducted a small-scale study with three adult learners of Japanese. He investigated their ability to identify instances of teacher feedback in a post hoc viewing of a video recording of a 50-minute lesson in which they and an unidentified number of other classmates had participated. One learner was able to identify 46% of the feedback moves in the 50-minute segment, another identified 37%, and another only 24%. Recasting was the predominant type of response to learner errors, constituting 60% of all feedback. Roberts coded many of the recast moves as partial recasts because they shortened the learner’s utterance to isolate the error, and the learners were more likely to identify these as feedback moves although they were still unable to identify any more than 43% of these partial recasts.