Chiến lược chữa lỗi bài viết trong giảng dạy kỹ năng viết cho người học ngoại ngữ

At this point, Ferris (2008) expose that indirect correction was proved to be most effective in enhancing learners’ accuracy in subsequent writing whereas learners[r]

INTRODUCTION

During the history of teaching writing to EFL learners, there has been a constant dispute among the scholars and the teachers on the role of the teachers’ error feedback in learners’ second language acquisition (SLA) Although the issue of error feedback has produced a wealth of studies over the years, these studies have mostly looked at the effect of error feedback (Bitchener, 2008; Truscott, 2007) or the appropriateness of error feedback (Ferris, 2008) Even that many feedback

LÊ THU HƯƠNG*

*Đại học Kinh Quốc dân, ✉lethuhuongp@gmail.com

Ngày nhận: 13/3/2017; Ngày hoàn thiện: 26/4/2017; Ngày duyệt đăng: 10/5/2017

CHIẾN LƯỢC CHỮA LỖI BÀI VIẾT TRONG GIẢNG DẠY KỸ NĂNG VIẾT

CHO NGƯỜI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ

TÓM TẮT

Trong năm gần có nhiều tranh luận xung quanh hiệu việc chữa lỗi viết cho người học ngoại ngữ giảng dạy kỹ Viết Những nghiên cứu chữa lỗi viết thực Truscott (1996) Ơng cho rằng, khơng nên chữa lỗi ngữ pháp viết người học, việc không hiệu việc nâng cao kỹ Viết cho người học Phản đối quan điểm Truscott, Ferris (2008) cho rằng, việc xử lý lỗi viết, bao gồm việc chữa lỗi giáo viên, quan trọng việc giảng dạy kỹ viết Xung quanh vấn đề cịn có nhiều nghiên cứu cách tiếp cận lỗi người học cho phù hợp chiến lược chữa lỗi hiệu cần áp dụng dạy kỹ Viết cho người học ngoại ngữ Do có nhiều tranh luận biện pháp chữa lỗi khác nên viết nghiên cứu chiến lược chữa lỗi với mục đích phân tích điểm mạnh điểm yếu khác phương pháp, để từ giúp giáo viên có lựa chọn chiến lược phù hợp giảng dạy kỹ Viết cho người học ngoại ngữ

Từ khóa:chữa lỗi, giảng dạy tiếng Anh, kỹ Viết.

ERROR FEEDBACK AND EFL LEARNERS’ WRITING SKILL

Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the effect of error feedback on EFL learners’ writing including Truscott J., Ferris D.R., Roberts or Abedi The issue of whether error correction works or not continues to be controversial and the strongest debate is being made by two big names Truscott and Ferris in the field of EFL error feedback

Truscott (1999; 2007) strongly argues against the effectiveness of grammatical feedback in EFL writing by pointing out the numerous problems in practice such as the teachers’ lack of knowledge or the learners’ different behaviors with the teachers’ feedback Therefore, it is his belief that error correction is of little benefit or even counterproductive so it should be kept aside in EFL writing classrooms In an earlier study of Zamel (1985), the quality of error feedback is doubted as the teachers are neither consistent nor systematic in providing feedback to learners Championing the case against Truscott’s firmly held position, Ferris and Roberts (2001) argue that Truscott’s arguments were premature and also strongly give the rapidly growing research evidence pointing out that error correction is widely seen as an essential factor in writing improvement by the teachers and learners, providing it is selective, prioritized and clear Regarding this point, the study of Ferris and Roberts (2001) emphasizes the importance of accuracy in writing and therefore error correction has contributed a lot in the learners’ written output accuracy Fathman and Walley (1990) conduct a study on the effect of error feedback on learners’ improvement in writing Two groups including one group receiving error feedback and one receiving little feedback were observed It has been demonstrated that the former did much better in grammatical writing than those received little feedback

Finally, Ferris and Roberts (2001) conclude that controversy continues as regards whether error feedback improves learners’ writing accuracy and their writing ability As Bitcherner (2008) reminds us, it has been too early to draw out the conclusive answer to the question of whether error feedback is effective to improve EFL learners’ accuracy As a result, the teachers cannot dismiss the learners’ strong desire for error feedback While there seems to be growing evidence showing that some strategies for error feedback may be more effective than the others, the research to date has tended to focus on investigating the different types of feedback strategies for the discussion of efficiency and prominence for the sake of the EFL learners’ writing skill improvement

OVERVIEW OF WRITTEN ERROR FEEDBACK STRATEGIES

In the analysis of Ferris (2008), error is widely seen as crucial writing development by the teachers In the present study, the learners’ errors are also welcomed on their writing for the progress of writing ability

A number of different ways in which errors can be corrected have been identified based on a theoretical view on how feedback works for acquisition by methodologists and SLA researchers Delgado (2007) takes the view that the teachers decide to implement what types of errors to focus on following the relevant decisions of the students Ferris (2008) argues that the most significant dichotomy is between direct and indirect feedback At this point, it seems that the research of Ellis (2008) on the typology of written feedback types covered nearly all the types of written error feedback strategies, particularly six basic strategies for providing feedback as follow:

The second is indirect feedback with two main types (indicating and locating the error or indication only)

The third is metalinguistic feedback in which the teacher provides some kinds of metalinguistic clue as to the nature of the error

The fourth is the focus of the feedback which concerns whether the teacher attempts to correct most of the learners’ errors or only select one or two types for correction At this strategy, the terms of unfocused feedback and focused feedback needs to be analyzed

The fifth is electronic feedback which teacher indicates an error and provides a hyperlink to a concordance file providing examples of correct usage The last is reformulation which relates to a native speaker’s reworking of the learners’ entire text to make the language native – like while keeping the original content

While a variety of researches on error feedback strategies has been suggested, debate continues about the influence of the different feedback strategies on EFL learners’ writing ability in the past years In the pages that follow, the pros and cons of each strategy will be discussed before reaching the conclusion which will be more advantageous than the others

DIRECT FEEDBACK

In the case of direct feedback, the teacher provides the learners with the correct form (Ellis, 2008) According to Ferris and Roberts (2001), direct or explicit feedback occurs when the teacher identifies the errors and provides correct form Moreover, direct error feedback can be shown with a number of different forms like crossing out an unnecessary words, phrases or morphemes, inserting words or morphemes or writing the correct form above or near the wrong ones Ellis (2008, p.99) also discusses

learners Accordingly, “direct error feedback provides learners with explicit guidance about how to correct their errors This is clearly desirable if learners not know what the correct form is (i.e are not capable of self-correcting the error)”

INDIRECT FEEDBACK

On the contrary, indirect feedback is applied when the teacher indicates learners’ errors by underlying or pointing out the errors’ location then let learners diagnose and solve by themselves Additionally, Bitchener (2008) reports that the studies investigating effect of indirect feedback strategies have tended to make a further distinction between those that or not use a code Coded feedback points to the exact location Uncoded feedback refers to the cases when the teachers underline, circle or place an error in the margin and then leave learners solve by themselves

Indirect error feedback can be done by various forms as listed by Ellis (2008) such as underlining the errors, using cursors to show omissions or placing a cross in the margin next to the line containing the error

According to Lalande (1982), indirect error feedback serves for “guided learning and problem solving” and encourages learners to reflect about linguistic forms (as cited in Ellis, 2008) Therefore, indirect error feedback seems to be considered as the contribution to long-term learning

METALINGUISTIC FEEDBACK

According to Ellis (2008), metalinguistic feedback provides some forms of explicit comment about the nature of errors At this point, the explicit comment is divided into two forms: the use of error codes and metalinguistic explanations

kinds of errors The places of the labels can be various: over the location of the error in the text or in the margin In the former case, learners will work out the correction required from the clues while in the latter, learners need to locate the error first before working out the correction

The second type of metalinguistic feedback is providing learners with metalinguistic explanations of their errors Using this kind of feedback means that the teachers need to locate the error and then expound the nature of errors to the learners As stated by Ellis (2008), metalinguistic explanations are far less common as its time consumption Moreover, metalinguistic explaining is not really an easy task for teachers It involves sufficient metalinguistic knowledge of the teachers with clear and accurate explanation for a variety of errors

FOCUSED AND UNFOCUSED FEEDBACK

As for unfocused feedback, the teachers select to correct all the learners’ errors in their compositions Alternatively they can select specific error types such as article, verb tense errors for correction which means focused feedback

It is likely more difficult to process corrections in unfocused feedback as the learners must attend to a variety of errors which leads to the insufficiency in each error reflection In this respect, focused feedback can promote the learners’ attention as well as their understanding of the errors’ nature However, unfocused feedback can be superior in the long run or at the advanced level as it addresses a wide range of errors at the same time

ELECTRONIC FEEDBACK

Ellis (2008, p.103) supports the usefulness of software programs in supporting the learners’ writing “electronic resources provide learners with the means where they can appropriate the usage of more experienced writers” As cited in Ellis (2008),

Milton offers an approach based on a software program named Mark My Words The program shows an electronic store of approximately 100 recurrent lexico-grammatical and style errors found in Chinese learners’ writing A brief comment on each error is provided with the links to the correct form The electronic store can be useful to the teacher by inserting brief metalinguistic comments into the learners’ text Then the text will be given back to the learner for their consultation of the electronic resources to compare his/her errors with illustrated language samples To some extent, it can assist learners in self correction Following the report of Milton, by using Mark My Words, the learners’ revisions were successful In her paper, Ellis points out some obvious benefits of this option Firstly, electronic feedback can eliminate the domination of the teachers in providing correct forms Moreover, a usage-based approach is more reliable as it can avoid fallible teachers’ intuition about grammatical correctness The last point which is undeniable is the role of this feedback type in promoting the role or the independence of learners in their writings

REFORMULATION

At this point, reformulation is completely different from direct error correction Sachs and Polio (2007) reports that the main difference between these two types was the matter of presentation and task requirements and there is no relation with the kinds of errors that were corrected As in an example conducted by Sachs and Polio (2007), the learners are shown their corrected stories, study the stories in 20 minutes and take notes if they want The next day, they were given a clean sheet of paper and asked to revise their stories without looking at the corrected texts or notes The correction group produces more accurate revisions than the reformulation group As pointed out, reformulation is a technique is not only for assisting learners with their surface level linguistic errors but also for drawing attention to higher order stylistic and organizational errors Accordingly, reformulation is by far a technique for teaching writing composition in sense of linguistic error revision but it is also far more than the path to lead the writers to the native-like style and their self-control in writing process

APPLICATION OF DIFFERENT ERROR FEEDBACK STRATEGIES IN EFL WRITING CLASSES

Over the past years there has been a dramatic increase in the studies which investigate whether the certain kinds of feedback works more than the others in helping EFL learners’ writing improvement (Bitchener et al, 2005)

A good number of studies have distinguished between direct and indirect strategies and investigated the extent to which they facilitate greater accuracy A recent study by Abedi et al (2010) involves the effect of direct and indirect feedback on Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL learners’ writing achievement In the study, 30 pre-intermediate learners were randomly divided into two groups: group one (DFG) receiving direct feedback on their writing

receiving indirect feedback In DFG, the teacher underlined the learners’ writing errors and gave learners the correct form so that they can aware of their errors and the corrected ones for their writing improvement In IFG, the metalinguistic strategy was also applied at the same time with the error codes without metalinguistic explanation The errors were detected by underlining or using error codes; for example, “S.P” means spelling error or “W.O” means word order error and then delivered to learners so that learners had to correct the errors by themselves and handed in the corrected writings in the following lessons

In fact, using the indirect feedback was shown to exert a positive effect on writing ability development compared to the direct ones As a result, the learners performed better on writing test through exposure to the indirect feedback, not the direct counterpart As stated in their research, Abedi and his colleagues’ statistics also supports Truscott’s belief that provision of direct feedback on EFL writing is ineffective since the learners of DFG have shown no significant improvement compared to their peers in IDG Besides the greater improvement of IFG in producing new writing pieces, one more reason for better progress in indirect feedback could be considered as the learners’ effort in locating and providing codes which can lead to consciousness raising task or more encouragement and independency Therefore, in their research, Abedi and his colleagues confirmed the idea of indirect error feedback over the direct ones

However, empirical evidence to date suggests that there is no advantage for indirect error feedback over direct error feedback In fact, Chandler finds that direct correction was more prominent than any other types of indirect correction in producing more accurate writing Chandler hypothesizes that a teacher’s direct correction helps EFL learners internalize the correct form more productively because indirect feedback, though it demands greater cognitive processing, delays confirmation of learners’ hypotheses She also reports that her EFL learners favoured direct correction

As stated by Ferris (2002), direct feedback may be appropriate for beginner learners and when the errors are “untreatable” which learners are not able to self-correct like vocabulary or pragmatics errors However, Ferris (2002) also points out the danger of direct error feedback is that the teacher may misinterpret learners’ meaning and put words into their mouth

Furthermore, the hypotheses could not yet be confirmed since results from studies exploring the efficacy of direct and indirect feedback are inclusive It is worth noticing the arguments that direct and indirect feedbacks were equally efficient At this point, Ferris (2008) expose that indirect correction was proved to be most effective in enhancing learners’ accuracy in subsequent writing whereas learners receiving direct feedback made the most accurate revisions The last point given by Chandler (2003) as the opponent of Bitchener (2008) that direct feedback contributes most in accuracy achievement, not only in revisions but also in subsequent writing In brief, these findings suggest that contrary to pedagogical suggestions in the EFL writing literature, indirect written error feedback may not be superior to direct error feedback

In the study of Delgado (2002), indirect strategy was applied between coded and uncoded groups The research shows that learners

benefited from coded feedback over uncoded feedback which encourages EFL the teachers to continue providing learners with coded feedback According to Deng (2010, p 601), the teachers reported making the most frequent use of indirect coded feedback followed by direct feedback Indirect coded feedback is preferred due to its efficiency in saving marking time Direct feedback is preferred as some the teachers think it is not sufficient to just give learners the codes One teacher noted “Codes alone are not enough I correct the errors so they can work on these and avoid the same errors next time”

Besides the ebullient debate on direct versus indirect feedback, Ferris and Roberts (2001) also support the benefit of error feedback on learners’ writing as long as error feedback is selective or focused From the view of learners in the paper of Deng (2010, p.602), they seem to prefer comprehensive or unfocused feedback because it helps to eradicate all errors Only 7% of the learners prefer selective or focused feedback with the argument that unfocused feedback is de-motivating “I don’t like my teacher mark so many on my paper… it looks so much and I don’t know how to start”

Accordingly, Delgado (2007) concludes that there appears to be mismatch between the strategies expected by the teachers and learners By using the narrative writing test and error correction test, it is stated that there are no statistically significant differences between focused and unfocused strategies Both types of feedback are equally effective However, there is some evidence to suggest that focused feedback may be more effective in the long run It is noted that according to Ellis (2008), it might be better to characterize the differences between the two types of feedback as “focused” versus “less focused” rather than “focused” versus “unfocused”

should help learners with metalinguistic understanding or metalinguistic strategy should be applied which allows for and surely benefits from the conscious monitoring in writing When taking direct and metalinguistic feedback into account, it is suggested that whether the teachers should combine direct and metalinguistic into direct metalinguistic feedback Sheen (2007) takes the view that direct metalinguistic group in the study shows a consistent increase over time whereas the direct – only group shows a slight decrease in their writing process At this point, Sheen (2007) cites the view of Schmidt on second language acquisition Schmidt distinguishes awareness at the level of noticing and at the level of understanding which is a higher level of awareness Noticing involves simply attending to exemplars of specific forms which direct feedback provides Understanding entails knowing a rule or principle that governs an aspect of language which metalinguistic feedback contributes to

In terms of reformulation, a study conducted by Sachs and Polio (2007) gives an insight into reformulation on linguistic writing accuracy It is noted that different types of feedback which were written in a familiar way on the learners’ papers in purple ink, indicating the locations more clearly than the case in the reformulation conditions and the learners not have to find the errors as well Yet reformulation lets learners search for differences by themselves and then they might be better able to devote cognitive resources to understanding and remembering the corrections longer

To sum up, the debate about the different effect of feedback strategies is still inconclusive Ferris (2008) states that teacher may decide to combine different types of feedback strategies, depending on whether he/she expects the learners to focus on some certain patterns of error As a result, some pedagogical implications which hope to contribute to the quality in writing

PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATION

In the study, Deng (2010) offers some implications on how to apply error feedback strategies effectively in writing instruction Firstly, the researcher confirms the value and benefit of error feedback on the learners’ written output In order to take advantage of error feedback strategies, teacher should apply focused feedback in helping learners to discover the rules of language by responding to errors selectively Secondly, so as to avoid mismatches between the teachers and learners in feedback strategies’ preferences, it is recommended that the teachers should establish better communication with learners with regards to the feedback strategies used such as listening to learners’ views on feedback strategy application or discussion on the effectiveness of the teachers’ actual feedback methods

Furthermore, according to Deng (2010), when error codes used, the teachers should pay attention to systematic application of error codes as learners can be easily confused about the meanings denoted by different codes

Moreover, Ferris (2008) suggests that learners have demonstrated an overwhelming desire for feedback and each type of error feedback certainly has its own benefit In the study of Ferris, it was observed that direct feedback led to greater accuracy in text revision while indirect feedback resulted in the production of fewer initial errors Thus, it is suggested that learners may be served best when the method of feedback is dictated by the error type and context