Truscott (1999) says that students are most aware of their metalinguistic knowledge, which is easily affected by correction but has very limited relation to language usage. Easy for learners to believe that a correction has helped them when in fact it had no effect on performance
Conversation
Replying to
There is no perfect language. What some refer to as a mistake is one person’s choice and identity. Honor all language repertoires.
2
Replying to
Many mistakes are definitely not by choice. Language is a convention and we need to learn that convention communicate. No need to demonize mistakes as they're inevitable if you are not there yet, but we should also develop methods that result in high communication ability.
1
Replying to
This is not about demonising errors. Literature review on corrective feedback pdfs.semanticscholar.org/02c5/86b83f744
2
Replying to
Hi Steve, I read that review and checked the references and it seems still nobody has shown that corrections actually work. No studies have all of: control group, measure spontaneous language usage, show benefits of corrections even a single month later.
Replying to
I don’t know if you mean error correction of written or spoken language, but this is clearly not an easy area to study. How could one ever produce an entirely reliable study? So we resort to metastudies which (apart from Truscott) seem to show some effect for corrective feedback.
1
Show replies