La retroalimentación correctiva escrita tiene un papel fundamental a la hora de ayudar a estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera de nivel intermedio a mejorar y alcanzar precisión. Así, la retroalimentación correctiva escrita se está haciendo cada vez más popular a la hora de ayudar a los estudiantes a aprender una lengua diferente a la materna. Constituye un enfoque motivador para los estudiantes, especialmente el tipo de retroalimentación indirecta, puesto que incentiva a los estudiantes a reflexionar sobre la lengua y a usar habilidades relacionadas con la razón y el pensamiento, las cuales aumentarán su interés en la asignatura.Written corrective feedback has a crucial role for intermediate EFL learners' to improve and achieve accuracy. Thus, WCF is becoming more and more popular when helping students learn a language different from their mother tongue. It constitutes a motivating approach for students, especially the indirect type of feedback as it encourages students to reflect on language and to use reasoning and thinking skills that will increase their interest in the subject

Sánchez García, María del Carmen

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  292 de 650  PublicacionesDidacticas.com  |  Nº 96 Julio 2018  Strategies to provide written corrective feedback to intermediate EFL learners Autor: Sánchez García, María del Carmen (Graduada en Estudios Ingleses). Público: Estudiantes de lengua extranjera. Materia: Lengua inglesa. Idioma: Inglés.   Title: Strategies to provide written corrective feedback to intermediate EFL learners. Abstract Written corrective feedback has a crucial role for intermediate EFL learners' to improve and achieve accuracy. Thus, WCF is becoming more and more popular when helping students learn a language different from their mother tongue. It constitutes a motivating approach for students, especially the indirect type of feedback as it encourages students to reflect on language and to use reasoning and thinking skills that will increase their interest in the subject. Keywords: Written corrective feedback, direct, indirect, foreign language classes, EFL learners   Título: Estrategias para proporcionar retroalimentación correctiva escrita a estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera de nivel intermedio. Resumen La retroalimentación correctiva escrita tiene un papel fundamental a la hora de ayudar a estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera de nivel intermedio a mejorar y alcanzar precisión. Así, la retroalimentación correctiva escrita se está haciendo cada vez más popular a la hora de ayudar a los estudiantes a aprender una lengua diferente a la materna. Constituye un enfoque motivador para los estudiantes, especialmente el tipo de retroalimentación indirecta, puesto que incentiva a los estudiantes a reflexionar sobre la lengua y a usar habilidades relacionadas con la razón y el pensamiento, las cuales aumentarán su interés en la asignatura. Palabras clave: retroalimentación correctiva escrita, directa, indirecta, clases de lengua extranjera, estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera.   Recibido 2018-05-18; Aceptado 2018-06-08; Publicado 2018-06-25;     Código PD: 096082   INTRODUCCIÓN Y JUSTIFICACIÓN Before studying the various types of written corrective feedback available to teachers nowadays, we should start describing what feedback and error correction mean. This paper will focus on written corrective feedback. Thus, following this line of research, we find several authors referring to WCF in different ways. Chaudron (1998) characterises WCF as the response that teachers give students to inform them that they have committed an error. He also affirms that this response has to be made explicit in order to focus learners' attention on the errors to correct them. The main objective of WCF will be to help students not to make those errors again. According to Lightbown and Spada (1999), corrective feedback is described as “an indication to the learners that his or her use of the target language is incorrect” (p. 172). These authors assert that the reactions of CF can be implicit or explicit and also that they can contain further metalinguistic information. Another author, Li (2010), claims that “corrective feedback in SLA refers to the responses to a learner's non-target like L2 production" (p. 309).  Turning to the distinction between oral CF and written CF, Sheen (2010) explained that oral CF happens immediately after the error takes place. However, written CF, the one in which we are interested in this paper, is delayed. In terms of cognition, Sheen stated that written CF is less demanding than oral CF. The reason is that the latter requires learners to provide an immediate response. Nevertheless, when taking into account accuracy, WCF aims at achieving accuracy in both content and organization. While in oral CF accuracy is only intended in the erroneous sentences. The following subsection examines different strategies for giving written corrective feedback to learners. A great deal of research has been conducted on the efficacy of various kinds of WCF. Many studies have contrasted these varieties of feedback with the aim of determining whether one type of feedback shows better results than others. In this way, in order to find out the efficacy associated to each kind of feedback, we need first to analyse the internal characteristics of each one. This analysis will enable us to delve into each variety and to be able to provide students with the most effective   293 de 650  PublicacionesDidacticas.com  |  Nº 96 Julio  2018  feedback according to their own needs. To conclude, all this study about the features of the different sorts of WCF is fundamental to deepen investigation of this research. MARCO TEÓRICO Y CONCEPTUAL In this section, we will focus on the various options that teachers can make use of in order to remove students' linguistic errors in their written works. The two most common types of WCF that instructors use to respond and correct students' errors are direct and indirect corrective feedback. However, there are also other dichotomies of feedback, for example, regarding the focus of the feedback as we can find unfocused or focused CF. With respect to metalinguistic CF, we can distinguish between the use of error code and the provision of brief grammatical descriptions. Moreover, we should also mention another sort of feedback referred to as reformulation.  To start with, when teachers provide students with direct feedback, they give them the correct form they should have used instead of what they originally wrote. The main benefit of this kind of feedback is that it is an explicit way to show students how to improve and reformulate their errors to make them correct (Ellis, 2009: 98-99). Additionally, it is said that it is more adequate to provide direct feedback than indirect feedback to learners with low level of proficiency in writing (Ferris and Roberts 2001). On the other hand, Sheen (2007) states that direct CF helps students acquire specific grammatical features. Finally, we have to highlight that direct feedback proved to be more appropriate when facing errors whose correct form students are not able to identify as they have not studied it yet. With this, I want to refer to a case in which a student has not yet studied the past tense of irregular verbs and he commits the error of writing drinked instead of drank. Taking this into account, it will be better to supply him or her the correct form of the verb and also the grammatical explanation for that form than only to tell him that there is an error. (Mohammad Jalaluddin, 2015:159) Turning to indirect feedback, the instructor does not give students the correct form of the error made, but only designates it. Regarding this sort of feedback, there is great controversy when claiming its effectiveness. Lanlande (1982) states that it is in fact more efficacious to use indirect feedback as it enables learners to reflect on their writings and to find out which errors they have made in order to reformulate them. Thus, students play an active role when correcting errors and it would lead to long-term learning. Nevertheless, other authors such as Ferris and Roberts (2001) claim that the results are the same whether providing direct or indirect corrective feedback. Focusing on the ways to indicate errors in indirect feedback, it is essential to mention the following two options. One way is by underlining and using cursors to make the learner know that there is something missing in his or her writing. In this case, the teacher indicates and also locates the error in the writing. Lee (1997) claimed that this option had better results in the students' processing of the feedback, although he did not contemplate long-term effects. The other form to provide indirect feedback is to mark in the margin that there is an error in a line of the text, but without pointing out the exact location of the error (Ellis, 2009: 98,100). Taking into account Ferris and Roberts' study, it might be stated that this type of indirect feedback where the exact location of the error is not provided might help learners to engage deeper in the processing of the feedback. The problem, still, is that there are no clear results, whether one or the other option is more helpful for students to assimilate indirect feedback. There is another kind of corrective feedback to mention, metalinguistic CF. This type of feedback involves the teacher to supply students with certain explicit metalinguistic clues about the nature of the error made. There are two ways to provide such clue, the most common is by using error code and the other form is by providing brief grammatical descriptions. In the former case, the instructor writes codes, which are different abbreviated labels depending on the kind of error made, such as "ww" for wrong word or "art" for article. These codes can be located over the specific position of the errors in the text or in the margin, where the exact location can or cannot be provided.  In this sense, if codes are placed over the errors, students would only need to think about and elaborate the correction needed from the given clues. However, if codes are only placed in the margin, students would need to identify the exact position of the error made and to elaborate a correction for it (Ellis, 2009: 100). There is great controversy when asserting the efficiency of this kind of feedback. According to Lalande (1982), the use of error codes contributes to the achievement of a high level of accuracy in later writings on the part of the students. However, Ferris (2006) stated that as a result of her study, the use of error codes was beneficial for students' achievement of accuracy, but only in two or four varieties of errors. Consequently, there are no congruous results showing that error codes produce better results on students achieving accuracy over time. Moreover, it is not known yet whether error codes are more or less effective than other kinds of WCF with reference to self-editing.   294 de 650  PublicacionesDidacticas.com  |  Nº 96 Julio 2018  Concerning the other way to give metalinguistic CF, we find instances where the teacher numbers the errors in a text and writes a grammatical explanation for each of these errors at the bottom of the text (Ellis, 2009: 101). Obviously, this way of providing metalinguistic feedback is more time consuming than simply using error codes. This is the main reason why this kind of feedback is less common. Another cause why it is not as frequent as error code is that it requires the instructor to have deep metalinguistic knowledge in order to give students explicit and precise descriptions for a diverse range of errors. A relevant study to mention here is that conducted by Sheen (2007). In this study, Sheen contracted metalinguistic CF with direct feedback. The results were that both contributed to improving accuracy in the learners' use of articles in consequent writings developed just after the corrected were provided. However, it was also proven that metalinguistic CF was more effective than direct CF in the long run. Another variety of CF has concerns the focus of the feedback. In this specific case, the distinction is made between focused and unfocused CF. In focused CF, the instructor only centres attention on one or two specific varieties of errors to review. In this way, this variety of feedback is intensive. Nevertheless, we refer to unfocused CF when the teacher struggles to correct all or most of the errors made by the students in the text. This sort of feedback is regarded as intensive. These distinctions are applicable to all of the previously studied techniques (Ellis, 2009: 98).  With respect to unfocused CF, it might be more difficult to process the corrections as students have to pay attention to a wider variety of errors than in focused CF. Consequently, they would have less time to contemplate and to delve into each error. On the other hand, it might be more efficacious for students to receive focused feedback as they can visualise and analyse different corrections of just one type of error or of a few specific kinds of errors. In this way, students can understand better why what they originally wrote in their texts was wrong and how to rework it. Finally, it has to be noticed that focused metalinguistic CF leads to attention, but most importantly, to understanding of the cause of the errors made. Thus, assisting students in the short term. On the contrary, unfocused CF helps students to improve in the long term as it covers a broader variety of errors to be examined (Ellis, 2009: 102). The last error correction technique we are going to discuss in this paper is reformulation. This feedback involves a native speaker's reworking of the original text written by the learner. During this process, it has to be highlighted that although the language is changed, the content is kept. In this way, the main objective of this is to provide the student with a native version of his or her writing, with respect to the language (Ellis, 2009: 98). As Cohen (1989) stated, the original text is edited in such a way as "to preserve as many of the writer's ideas as possible, while expressing them in his/her own words so as to make the piece sound native-like" (p. 4). In spite of all this, it has to be emphasised that the students have the last word when deciding which errors to correct and how to do so. The learner who has written the original text analyses the new version of his/her work making decisions about which changes to include when rewriting the text. In accordance with what has been previously said, there are two main procedures to follow in reformulation, "direct correction" and "revision" (Ellis, 2009:103).        295 de 650  PublicacionesDidacticas.com  |  Nº 96 Julio  2018   Bibliografía  Chaudron, C. (1998). Second Language Classrooms: Research on Teaching and Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Cohen, A. (1989). Reformulation: A technique for providing advanced feedback in writing. Guidelines 11/2: 1–9.  Ellis, R. (2009). A typology of written corrective feedback types. English Language Teaching Journal, 63, 97-107.  Ferris, D. R. (2006). Does error feedback help student writers? New evidence on the  short-  and long-term effects of written error correction. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (pp. 81– 104). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Ferris, D. R., & Roberts, B. J. (2001). Error feedback in L2 writing classes: How explicit does it need to be. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10, 161–184.  Jalaluddin, M. (2015). Role of Direct and Indirect Corrective Feedback in improvement  of Hindi students’ writing skills. American International Journal of Research in  Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, 11(3), 159-162.   Lalande, J. F., II (1982). Reducing composition errors: An experiment. Modern Language Journal, 66, 140–149.  Lee, I. (1997). ESL learners’ performance in error correction in writing: Some implications for teaching. System, 25, 465–477.  Li, S. (2010). The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 60, 309-365.  Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (1999). How languages are learned. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.  Sheen, Y. (2007). The effect of focused written corrective feedback and language aptitude on ESL learners’ acquisition of articles. TESOL Quarterly, 41, 255– 283.  Sheen, Y. (2010). The role of oral and written corrective feedback in SLA. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 169–179.   

Strategies to provide written corrective feedback to intermediate EFL learners

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Strategies to provide written corrective feedback to intermediate EFL learners

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