Oral language accuracy, corrective feedback and learner uptake in an online efl course

• Autores: Jorge E. Pineda
• Directores de la Tesis: Eulàlia Canals Fornons (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ( España ) en 2020
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Dolors Masats Viladoms (presid.), Marina Ruiz Tada (secret.), Janine Knight (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Educación y TIC (e-learning) por la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Materias:
  • Lingüística
    • Lingüística aplicada
      • Enseñanza de lenguas
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: O2 Repositori UOC
• Resumen

  • Language teaching is a field in constant evolution and the use of technology has boosted its development. The use of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) technologies has broadened the scope of possibilities for teaching and learning languages, offering unprecedented opportunities to learn languages in different settings (face-to-face, blended, or exclusively online), using a variety of pedagogical approaches (task-based language teaching, flipped classroom, technology-enhanced teaching and learning, gamification, etc.). However, this proliferation of technological tools and pedagogical approaches has posed several questions for teachers and researchers, among them how to best integrate technology into teaching (Nguyen & Bower, 2018) and their effects on the learners’ target language development. An equally important concern is the role which teacher feedback has in technology-enhanced language learning (Anthony, 2010; Hauck & Stickler, 2006; Yanguas & Bergin, 2018). In exclusively online language learning settings, such as the one in the present investigation, the question of how to provide corrective feedback becomes particularly relevant due to the asynchronous nature of most learning activities in online language courses. Given that immediate corrective feedback is known to facilitate the acquisition of certain grammatical structures (Arroyo & Yilmaz, 2017; S. Li, Zhu, & Ellis, 2016; Shintani & Aubrey, 2016), and that oral skills are highly neglected and consequently are the most challenging to practice in fully online language courses (Ko, 2012; Volle, 2005), this investigation seeks to identify the most common errors that learners do, the correction strategies that a teacher uses and the reactions from learners in interactions in synchronous sessions called online lessons that aim at developing learners´ oral skills and promoting interaction. This investigation analyzes the errors produced by learners, the correction strategies the teacher uses and the subsequent successful or unsuccessful repair moves learners produce during the synchronous learning activities using the error treatment sequence proposed by Lyster & Ranta (1997). Additionally, the frequency and distribution of learners’ uptake (Lyster & Ranta, 1997, p.49) is detailed examining the successive repair moves or lack-of-thereof produced by the learners as a response to their teacher’s correction strategies. This allows to give an account of which correction strategies lead to successful repairs. The participants are six Colombian graduate students enrolled in a 20-week fully-online, low intermediate English language course. The findings will have implications for online language instruction given that previous research has identified that teachers need to develop new teaching skills (Compton, 2009; Hampel & Hauck, 2004; Ko, 2012) that are crucial for teaching online language courses whose objective is communication.

    This is a qualitative case study with a mixed-methods and a Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) approach that combines qualitative and quantitative research methods. This study takes a theory-driven approach as theory informs different stages of the study: research design, data collection, analysis, and inference (Creswell & Plano-Clark, 2011; Schrauf, 2018). Data for this study come from the teacher-student interactions in synchronous learning activities in the online course, in in-depth interviews with learners and their teacher, a focus group with the learners, and the grades obtained in the oral assessment activities from the course. In order to analyze the learners’ oral productions, this study is informed by the error-treatment sequence (Lyster & Ranta, 1997) and it uses the clause as a basic unit of analysis. This investigation identifies the number of clauses containing errors, the number of clauses containing correction strategies and the number of clauses containing repair moves to calculate percentages, means and standard deviations. The analysis of the participation in the focus group and the in-depth interviews is also informed by the error-treatment sequence because this study explores the general opinions of the participants and the level of awareness of error production, the use of correction strategies and the selection of repair moves. The results from the analysis of the in-depth interviews and the focus group served to broaden the scope of the results from the analysis of the oral performances in the synchronous learning activities. The main findings of this investigation show how language accuracy evolves throughout the course. Most learners produced mistakes at a similar rate and the number of mistakes they made dropped towards the end of the course, something which is also reflected in the language accuracy marks their teacher gave. The teacher tended to provide explicit corrective feedback, which nonetheless went mostly unnoticed by the students. When students realized about the mistake, they repaired it by repeating the teacher correction in the majority of the cases. There is a clear correspondence between the most common types of mistakes learners produced and the most common mistakes the teacher corrected. The results of students self-reported perceptions about the course, the errors they made, and the role of their teacher’s feedback reveal that their perceptions regarding the errors they produced coincides with the most common errors they made, and to a large extent also with the type of mistakes and the way their teacher corrected them. According to the learners, taking part in the course, their teacher’s help in making them aware of the errors they made and their own reflections about the repair moves, helped them develop a certain level of language awareness, the ability to occasionally self-diagnose errors, and self-confidence to speak the target language.