VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
NHẠC THANH HƯƠNG CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK AND UPTAKE PATTERNS
IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY SPEAKING LESSONS
(HÀNH VI SỬA LỖI CỦA GIÁO VIÊN VÀ VIỆC TIẾP NHẬN CỦA
SINH VIÊN TRONG GIỜ NÓI TIẾNG ANH)

M.A Combined Program Thesis

English Methodology

Major code: 60 14 10 Hanoi - 2011 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acceptance……………………………………………………………………
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………
Abstract………………………………………………………………………
Table of contents………………………………………………………………
Lists of abbreviations…………………………………………………………
Lists of tables and figures…………………………………………………… CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………
1.1 Statement of the problem and rationale for the study……………………
1.2 Aims of the study………………………………………………………….
1.3 Scope of the study…………………………………………………………
1.4 Research questions……………………………………………………….
1.5 Methods of the study………………………………………………………
1.6 Significances of the study…………………………………………………
1.7 Terminology used in the study…………………………………………….
1.8 Organization of the study………………………………………………….
Summary……………………………………………………………………… CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………
2.1 Language errors……………………………………………………………
2.1.1 Definition of language errors……………………………………………
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2.2.1 Definition of teachers‘ corrective feedback……………………………
2.2.2 Types of teachers‘ corrective feedback………………………………….
2.3 Learners‘ uptake…………………………………………………………
2.4 Issues in second language acquisition…………………………………….
2.4 Studies on corrective feedback in second language acquisition…………
Summary…………………………………………………………………… CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY……………………………………………
3.1 Participants………………………………………………………………
3.2 Data collection instruments………………………………………………
3.3 Procedures…………………………………………………………………
3.3.1 Procedures of data collection…………………………………………….
3.3.2 Procedures of data analysis……………………………………………
Summary……………………………………………………………………… CHAPTER 4: RESULTS……………………………………………………
4.1 An overview of students and teachers turns……………………………….
4.2 Two research questions……………………………………………………
4.2.1 What patterns of corrective feedback occur in English speaking lessons
for second- year students in Hanoi Law University?
4.2.2 To what extent does that corrective feedback lead to students‘ uptake?
Summary………………………………………………………………………. CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION………………………………………………… 7 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION……………………………………………….
6.1 Brief summary of the findings…………………………………………….
6.2 Pedagogical Implications…………………………………………………
6.3 Limitation of the study…………………………………………………….
6.4 Suggestions for further studies…………………………………………….

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………
APPENDIX
Appendix 1……………………………………………………………………
Appendix 2……………………………………………………………………. 67
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I
II


L2 Language 2
T1, 2, 3 Teacher 1, 2, 3

Sts Students 9 LISTS OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 1: Frequency of Turns with Students Error, Teacher Feedback and Student
Uptake in 6 English- speaking periods of Pre-intermediate level.
Table 2: Frequency of Turns with Students Error, Teacher Feedback and Student
Uptake in 6 English- speaking periods of Intermediate level.
Table 3: Distribution of Total Corrective Feedback Types (of both pre-intermediate
and intermediate level)
Table 4: Distribution of Corrective Feedback of Pre-intermediate classes.

1.1 Statement of Problem and Rationale for the Study.
The impact of corrective feedback on learners‘ L2 acquisition remains controversial
in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. In fact, there has been some
polarization of thought regarding the effectiveness of corrective feedback, leading
to different or even contradicting theories. For example, DeKeyser (1993) states that
corrective feedback is unnecessary to L2 learning. In other words, corrective
feedback does not lead to the acquisition of L2. However, scholars such as Brooks,
Schraw, and Crippen (2002) and Mason and Bruning (2000), for example, disagree
with DeKeyser, holding that feedback plays an important and crucial role in the
language learning process.

Recently, there has been increasing empirical evidence that corrective feedback
provided by teachers at least enables students to notice the gap between their inter-
language forms and the target language forms, thus helping them to restructure the
inter-language grammar. Additionally, corrective feedback from teachers also helps
enhance students' meta- linguistic awareness (Panova and Lyster, 2002). Therefore,
teachers' corrective feedback is of great importance in promoting student- generated
repairs and in turn, language acquisition. A literature review shows that researchers
have been increasingly interested in examining the relationship between corrective
feedback and uptake (Wai King Tsang, 2004). For example, negotiation of form has
been shown to be able to elicit uptake and successful repair more effectively than
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explicit correction. Also it has shown that different types of feedback moves tend to
function differentially according to different types of errors.

One issue related to corrective feedback, which has gained little agreement among
researchers and scholars is which type of feedback, i.e., explicit or implicit, is more

focused only one level: elementary level, thus, the results, to some extent, could not
reflect the behavior of a larger population at different levels.

For all those reasons, this study is a modest attempt to contribute to the common
knowledge of the impact of corrective feedback on learners‘ L2 acquisition. It also
attempts to narrow the research gap in this area.

1.2 Aims of Study
This research aims to:
 Find out the patterns of teachers' corrective feedback and learners'
uptake in English speaking lessons for second- year students in Hanoi
Law University.
 Examine the relationship between different kinds of teachers'
corrective feedback and learners' uptake, so as to inform teachers of
English in the context of Vietnamese university classrooms of how to
enhance the effect of their corrective feedback.
 Identify the same and differences in the use of corrective feedback at
two different levels.

1.3 Scopes of the Study
This study limits itself to the exploration of the types of corrective feedback that
were commonly used by the teachers in the study and the relationship between
different corrective feedback types on students' oral errors. Thus, teachers' feedback
on students' written errors is beyond the scope of this study.
Given the scope of the study, data for this study were collected from the
observations of English speaking lessons taught to the second year students of pre-
intermediate and intermediate levels at Hanoi Law University.

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1.6 Significance of the Study
Feedback is a necessary part of every learning process. Feedback provides students
with the information on their performance and learning progress. Therefore, it is
very important to know the feedback types that lead to more effective learning,
especially in the secondary foreign language classroom. The literature review
demonstrated that there are many contradictory views on the issue of feedback
provision. As a result, there is still no agreement between researchers on which type
language feedback is more effective in terms of language learning. Moreover, there
is also no information regarding feedback effectiveness in relationship to students‘
language development. The study was conducted to find out whether there was a
correspondence between and the extent to which teachers‘ oral corrective feedback
led to students‘ uptake depending on types of errors that students made. This
information should be useful to foreign language teachers as they develop practical
feedback classroom strategies because Lyster and Ranta (1997) noted that ―because
of so many different approaches to feedback, second language teachers have trouble
finding research that addresses practical issues of corrective feedback‖ (p. 38).
Particularly, it offers teachers of English a number of important pedagogical
implications in terms of error treatment. Specifically, teachers can be informed
about the effects of different corrective feedback patterns, based on which they can
choose the ones that suit their students‘ levels and work for the types of errors that
these students make.

1.7 Terminology Used in the Study
1. Foreign Language (FL) (language that is learned by a student who speaks
other languages everyday)
2. Second Language (L2) (language that is learned by a student which is

11. Clarification request is a corrective technique that prompts the learner to
self- correct (Lyster and Ranta, 1997)
12. Repetition. The teacher repeats the students' errors and adjusts intonation to
draw student's attention to it.
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13. Elicitation: is a corrective technique that prompts the learner to self- correct
(Lyster and Ranta, 1997)
14. Uptake is defined as "a student's utterance that immediately follows the
teachers' feedback and that constitutes a reaction in some way to the teachers'
intention to draw attention to some aspect of the student's initial utterance"
(Lyster and Ranta, 1997:49).
15. Repair is defined as the correct reformulation of an error as uttered in a
single student turn (Lyster and Ranta, 1997:49)
16. Needs Repair—A learner‘s actions as a reaction to corrective feedback on
his/her eroneous turn that failed to result in correction of an error/s
17. Pushed output is the output that reflects what learners can produce when they
are pushed to use the target language accurately and concisely (Swain, 1985)
18. Immersion Language Program—an intense language learning process,
whereby students not only study the target language, but use the language
exclusively in other classes, as well as in daily activities.

1.8 Organization of the Study
The thesis is composed of 6 chapters. The first chapter presents the research focus
and provides the rationale for it as well as its aims, scopes, method, research
questions and the significance of the study. Chapter 2 reviews the literature on
students‘ errors, teachers‘ corrective feedback and students‘ uptake as well as on the
relationship between teachers‘ corrective feedback and learners‘ uptake in order to


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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this chapter is to review the literature on the relationship between
teacher's error corrections, in a broader sense, teacher's corrective feedback and
learners' uptake. This chapter starts with an overview of language errors, and
approaches to error correction. Secondly, literature on teachers‘ corrective feedback
and students‘ uptake are reviewed. Finally, a number of studies on corrective
feedback in second language acquisition are discussed in terms of differences and
similarities.

2.1 Language Errors.
2.1.1 Definition of Language Errors
The definition of language errors is rather complex as different authors have
different ways of defining it. In order to provide the most appropriate definition of
error, it is necessary to consider some related issues.


undoubtedly useful to language learning and teaching. In this study, an error is
defined according to Snow (1977) who assumes that errors are what occurs when
the learner does something wrong without knowing it, or he may know he is doing
it wrong but does not know how to put it right.

It is also noted that speaking errors are the focus of this study. Speaking errors, like
errors in general, occur when the learner does something wrong without knowing it
or he/she may know he/she is doing it wrong but does not know how to put it right.
Also, as speaking errors are a kind of spoken language, they can be understood as
"faults made by speakers during the production of sounds, words and sentences"
(Richard Platt, and Platt, 1992:344). 20
2.1.2 Classification of Language Errors
Errors can be classified in different ways depending on the nature of such
classification and the purpose of the author. In this thesis, the researcher only
provides some typical ways of error classification.

Errors are categorized into overt errors which are obviously ungrammatical or of
wrong pronunciation and covert errors, which are superficially well formed but not
interpretable (Brown (1994:208)). For example, an overt error is found in the
sentence ―Last Saturday, I go to Cuc Phuong National Park‖ in the form of incorrect
grammar. Whereas a covert error appears in the sentence ―The monitor makes an

In fact, it is hard to distinguish intra-lingual and inter- lingual errors in practice.
Therefore, errors caused by language transfer are not included in this study. Instead,
the researcher uses the way of classifying errors, which categorizes them into
various levels of linguistic form (Edge, 1989:11): phonological, grammatical, and
lexical

2.1.3 Approaches to Error Correction
There are a large number of differences in attitudes towards errors and error
correction between traditional and modern methods of language teaching. In
traditional language classes, errors were not allowed. Errors were seen as evidence
of ineffective learning or even laziness. Also, teachers paid little attention to how to
correct errors effectively. If they corrected an error, it would be giving the student
the correct model and getting him/ her to repeat it. However, Van Lier (1988) noted
that in the late sixties and early seventies, teachers began to comprehend that errors
might be more an indication of learner efforts to form a new linguistic system rather
than linguistic failure. Specifically, in the light of communicative language
teaching, errors are seen as positive steps towards learning. The teacher‘s attitude
towards correction is positive and correction techniques are used to encourage
students, not to put them down or make them feel stupid. For these teachers, a
perfect lesson is full of students' errors, in which teachers' correction is an integral
part.
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Error correction now is seen as a technique to get students to speak right out what
they want to say. Error correction not only helps a learner correct his/her errors but
also helps him/her to develop his/her language competence without distracting
communication purposes. It means that in language classes, when error correction is
carried out, the negotiation of meaning and negotiation of form, at the same time are


Having agreed with the principles of correction, the next question to ask is “Which
errors should be corrected?‖ According to Hugh (2000), errors, which are regularly
repeated by one or more students or are considered to be the most serious, should be
treated. In order to do that, firstly, types of errors should be differentiated (Hugh,
2000). The distinction can be made between global errors and local errors. In
general, global errors, which hinder or interfere with communication of the
speaker‘s message are more serious and thus should be corrected so that learners
can carry out clear communication (Mac Donald, 2000). Another distinction can be
made between competence errors, which occur because the learner does not yet
know how to perform a skill and performance errors, which are often ―slips of
tongue‖ or ―slips of pen‖ (Mac Donald, 2000). If the mistakes are competence
errors, then feedback should be provided. Another important point is the frequency
of an error. If an error is repeated several times insistently, it needs to be corrected
(Hugh, 2000)

There is no absolute ―rule‖ about when to or not to correct students’ errors. Perhaps
we should not correct when a learner is focusing on communicating because it is
non-communicative, inauthentic, and inappropriate to the aims of the task (Ur,
2006). However, Harmer (2005) claims that learners want to be corrected at the
moment they make the mistake. Both ideas seem plausible, nonetheless. Thus,
which is more important? ―Preserving the fluent process and communicative nature
of the interaction?‖ or ―providing corrective feedback where it is needed to help
learners improve their accuracy?‖ The decision will involve a lot of different
considerations specific to the learner: the importance of encouraging fluency, the
importance of encouraging accuracy, the confidence and self-image of the learner,
and the sheer number of mistakes (Ur, 2006).

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repair. Others, such as Calve (1992), recommend both self- repair and peer- repair,
which are also known as student- generated repairs (Lyster and Ranta 1997), with
teachers' clues rather than recast. However, Gass and Varonis (1994) do not share
the same view with Calve (1992) when he advocates more teachers‘ direct and overt
corrective feedback in order to avoid misleading learners into believing that
linguistic errors are acceptable.

In conclusion, error correction has been investigated from the early times of
communicative language teaching. Those studies, in some ways, all imply the
relationship between teachers' error correction and learners' responses after being
corrected. In the scope of this study, the researcher only examined a case study in
one university to confirm conclusions drawn from earlier research. In this study,
corrective feedback is to be investigated.

2.2 Teachers' Corrective Feedback
2.2.1 Definition of Teachers’ Corrective Feedback
One of the main roles of the language teacher is to give feedback to students' work.
In Lumetta‘s (2005) view, effective feedbacks are those which not only need to be
specific (precise and specific examples or behaviors), frequent (giving feedback as
frequently as possible), timely (delivering as close in time to the incident if
applicable), but also contain both positive (reinforcing)/ negative (corrective)
feedback. In this study, the researcher only focuses on negative feedback, which
often takes the form of error correction in English speaking lessons. Error
correction, in the view of Edge (1989:20) is "a way of reminding students of the
forms of Standard English. It should not be a kind of criticism or punishment".
Long‘s (1996) view of feedback in general is more comprehensive. It suggests that

room everyday‖, corrective feedback can be explicit, for example, ―no, you should
say cleans, not clean‖ or implicit ―yes, she cleans the room everyday‖, and may or
may not include meta-linguistic information, for example, ―Don‘t forget to make the
verb agree with the subject‖.

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Thus, teachers' corrective feedback, to some extent, is the teacher's correction and
can be defined as teachers' indication to learners' errors, which takes the forms of
implicit or explicit correction. The researcher of this study agrees with Lightbrown
and Spada‘s (1999) definition above, but adopts the following definition by Ellis,
Loewen and Erlam (2006) that
Corrective feedback takes the form of teacher‘s responses to learner
utterances that contain an error. The responses can consist of (a) and
indication that an error has been committed; (b) the provision of the correct
target language form; or (c) metalinguistic information about the nature of
the error; or any combination of these (p.340)

2.2.2 Types of Teachers' Corrective Feedback
Lyster and Ranta (1997) observed a variety of lessons and yielded six different types
of corrective feedback
Explicit correction: By explicit correction, the teacher clearly indicates that the
student's utterance is incorrect, and then, he/ she provides the correct form (Lyster
and Ranta, 1997:47)
 For example:
S: The day…. tomorrow (lexical error)
T: Yes, no. The day before yesterday (explicit correction)
Recast: is an implicit corrective feedback move that reformulates or expands an