Oral Corrective Feedback & Repair Techniques in Dyadic Online Efl Young Learner Speaking Lessons

Abstract

Corrective feedback has been at the centre of many SLA studies due to the desire to reveal its impact in creating opportunities for learning. Many of those studies have been mostly delimited to the experimental settings to compare different types of oral corrective feedback, primarily their effectiveness for learning grammatical structures. However, very few studies examined video-mediated or natural interactions to understand oral trajectories of feedback and its impact on young learners. With this in mind, this study explored what kinds of oral corrective feedback practitioners enacted on meaning and form in an informal video-mediated young learners EFL interaction setting and how/if these actions led to learner repairs. Aligning with this purpose, this study, in the first place, analysed the frequencies of corrective feedback through coding based on Lyster & Ranta’s (1997) model and repairs with respect to error distribution (syntactic, morphological, phonological, semantic). In the follow-up analysis, the researcher traced the details of correction sequences longitudinally across ten different one-to-one sessions of learners through discourse analysis. Nearly 20 hours of data coming from EFL-speaking lessons of 10 young learners inform us that teachers' preferences in online settings mainly rely on recasts with relatively fewer use of elicitations followed by explicit feedback and other CF moves. However, elicitation and sporadically used double corrective moves proportionally led to more repairs of learners than the most preferred CF, recasts. Nonetheless, some errors repaired by learners were repeated in future sessions, unveiling that the impact of correction and repair may not be long-lasting.