Corrective discourse model developed by Lyster and Ranta (1997)

Uptake: “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”

Feedback types - Lyster and Ranta (1997)

- explicit correction: the explicit provision of the correct form

o As the teacher provides the correct form, he or she clearly indicates that what the
student had said was incorrect.
o e.g.
S: So we write pacific [paʃifik] (Error – phonological)
T: Say [pasifik], not [paʃifik] (Feedback – explicit)
- recast:
o the teacher’s reformulation of all or part of a student’s utterance, without the error
o e.g.
S: You should go see doctor. (Error – grammatical)
T: the doctor. (Feedback – recast)
o generally the most deployed type
- clarification requests
o in the form of question such as “Pardon?” and “I’m sorry?” or attempts to reveal the
intended form of the error with the rising tone.
o e.g.
S: result [result] of something (Error – phonological)
T: What did you say? (Feedback – clarification)
- metalinguistic feedback
o comments, information, or questions related to the well-formedness of the student’s
utterance, without explicitly providing the correct form.
o e.g.
S: She without. (Error – grammatical)
T: without… what is the verb? (Feedback – metalinguistic)
- elicitation:
o techniques that teachers use to directly elicit the correct form from the student (e.g.
strategic pauses)
o e.g.
S: Because I enjoy city life [laip] (Error – phonological)
T: City… (Feedback – elicitation)
o generally more effective at producing uptake.
- repetition
o the teacher’s repetition, in isolation, of the student’s erroneous utterance (most
cases: teachers adjust their intonation to highlight the error)
o e.g.
S: A garden [kuden] is full of flowers (Error – phonological)
T: [kuden]? (Feedback – repetition)
Questions to think about:

- Is there a correlation between the type of the error (grammatical, phonetical etc.) and the
type of the corrective feedback given by the teacher?
- Uptake:
o Did the students use it correctly afterwards?
o Full repair or only partial? Off the target (corrected something other than it was
intended)?
o Repetition (when correct answer was provided by the teacher)
self-repair (when the teacher does not already provide the correct form),
or peer-repair?
- Important factor: fluency or accuracy work?
- According to different studies, students often desire corrective feedback – did the students
seemingly require that in our case?

References

Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in
communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 37-66.

Margolis, D. P. (2010). Handling Oral Error Feedback in Language Classrooms. Minnesota and
Wisconsin Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Retrieved from the University of
Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://purl.umn.edu/109923.

Suzuki, M. (2004). Corrective feedback and learner uptake in adult ESL classrooms. Columbia
University Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics, 4 (2), 1-21.