Correcting students' spoken errors

In the run-up to the publication of the second edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit (Smith and Conti, 2023), I shall post the occasional blog post with short extracts from the text. This little section is about correcting correcting students' spoken errors. In the research literature this is usually referred to as corrective oral feedback. I previously posted something about 'learned attention', drawing on the work of Nick Ellis. This extract picks out some key research in this complex field of oral error correction. Elsewhere in the text we go into some detail about the value of correcting written errors.

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A commonly asked question concerns the correction of students’ spoken errors. Should we do it? Which errors should we correct? How? When? The research in this area is copious and has, alas, produced mixed findings. Two terms are often used to describe how we correct oral errors: prompts and recasts. A prompt is an explicit correction of some type, e.g. where we correct the student or by the tone of our voice or facial expression, make it clear there was an error. A recast is where we give a correct reformulation of what a student said, without making it clear there was an error. (This distinction between prompts and recasts may not be clear-cut, since we cannot be sure if a student has grasped that the recast is actually a correction.)

Lyster and Ranta (1997) carried out an influential study of how teachers correct in the classroom and which types of correction work best. They found that recasts were the most common type of corrective feedback, but that students only occasionally ‘repaired’ (i.e. improved) their output as a response. It is pretty obvious why teachers like recasts, since they do not want to discourage students by correcting them. When students do repair their speech, the authors argue that this allows students to automatise the retrieval of L2 knowledge that already exists in some form. But also, when students repair, they draw on their own resources and confront errors which may lead to changes in their hypotheses about the L2.

In a nutshell, there is value in correction, done in the right way, at the right time, with the right students. Be aware that recasts may not be noticed, especially by less proficient students, and be selective with corrections, choosing errors which impede communication and students who may benefit from the correction. It is a subtle business!