Refocusing teacher feedback on collocation errors

Abstract

In this presentation, we scrutinize findings from the English Taiwan Learner Corpus (ETLC), which contains Taiwanese high school students’ English writings and the written corrective feedback provided about these writings by English writing teachers. The study examines the range and types of written corrective feedback given by teachers for verb-noun collocation errors. Firstly, only 171 of the 309 sentences tagged by teachers indicating a lexical error actually contained such errors, indicating that teachers inability to differentiate rule-based from lexical-based errors. In addition, when providing feedback on verb-noun collocation errors, teachers tended to use direct and indirect feedback at the expense of metalinguistic feedback. Results are discussed in connection to the proposal that there are benefits for focusing on a single lexical error (e.g., verb-noun collocations) and providing focused and direct corrective feedback incorporated in awareness raising L2 writing tasks. This study highlights an importance in drawing learners’ attention to targeted verb-noun collocations (i.e., receptive knowledge) prior to providing opportunities to produce those targeted collocations when completing L2 writing tasks (i.e., productive knowledge).

Full text

Barry Lee Reynolds, University of Macau
Mark Feng Teng, Hong Kong Baptist University
Refocusing Teacher Feedback
on Collocation Errors

Introduction
•The written corrective feedback debate (see Lee, 2016,
2017)
•Positive results associated with focused written
corrective feedback (e.g., Ferris, 2002; Hyland & Hyland,
2006)
•Teachers spend a lot of time on corrective feedback
because they want to help L2 learners improve in their L2
writing
•The problem we are addressing in this study is not
whether L2 writing teachers should provide written
corrective feedback on word-choice errors but rather
how they should do so.

Background
•Written corrective feedback refers to written
information a teacher provides to L2 writers
regarding how their writing can be enhanced
(Bitchner & Ferris, 2012)
•Such feedback is often:
–direct (i.e., the teacher supplies the correct form)
(Ellis, 2002; Ferris, 2006, 2010)
–focused (i.e., the teacher systematically selects
one or a few errors types to correct) (Ellis, 2002;
Ferris, 2006, 2010)

Background
•Other feedback types provided by teachers
include:
–indirect (i.e., the teacher marks the locations of
errors for L2 writers to self-correct) (Ellis, 2002;
Ferris, 2006, 2010)
–metalinguistic feedback (i.e., the teacher poses
questions, provides comments, or offers
information related to the error without providing
the correct form) (Cornillie, Van de Noortgate, Van
de Branden & Desmet, 2017)

Background
•Previous error feedback research has mostly
examined rule-based (i.e., grammar) errors,
even though L2 writing teachers provide
feedback on both rule-based and non rule-
based (i.e., word-choice) errors (e.g., Ferris &
Roberts, 2001)
•How to deal with word-choice errors?
–Advise learners to use corpus tools for self-
correction (e.g., Reynolds, 2015); however, EFL
learners have shown resistance to self-editing
(Reynolds, 2016)

Background
•Clarity is key in writing—selecting the most
suitable words ensures writers are conveying
their intended message
•L2 writers often struggle in selecting
appropriate collocates for node words
–take medicine rather than *eat medicine
•These “miscollocations” are often due to
incongruence between the L1 and L2 and
semantic confusion in the L2 (Agustín Llach,
2015)

Background
•Collocation errors are unavoidable as they
occur in all written texts and must be
produced accurately to ensure intended
meaning (Lewis, 2000; Vedder & Benigno,
2016)
•Unlike grammatical rule-based errors that can
be reduced with metalinguistic written
corrective feedback, miscollocations cannot
be explained with grammar rules
–Collocations are arbitrary and idiomatic (e.g., do homework and not
write homework)

Why target verb-noun
collocations?
•Verb-noun collocations refer to phrases that
contain a verb and a noun that frequently
cooccur (Lewis, 2000)
–They make language clear and natural (Lewis,
2000)
–They appear frequently in L2 writing and are a
challenge for L2 writers (Laufer & Waldman, 2011)

Research Aim
•As few useful guidelines are available for ELT
practitioners in providing written corrective
feedback for collocation errors in L2 learners’
writing, this study aimed to provide L2 writing
teachers with advice for providing accurate,
complete, and appropriate feedback regarding
students’ word choice errors.
•To reach this aim, we first needed to
investigate what teachers were currently
doing.

Method
•English Taiwan Learner Corpus (ETLC) (Shih,
2000)
–largest annotated learner corpus of English in
Taiwan
–Taiwanese high school students’ writing and
accompanying feedback provided by students’ L2
English writing teachers

Method
•Students’ sentences and teachers’ feedback
were extracted from the corpus by searching
for any tags teachers used that included
“word”
•Results were the extraction of 309 teacher
feedback comments
–“word choice” (n = 183)
–“word form” (n = 80)
–“字詞不當” improper wording (n = 23)
–“change this word” (n = 16)
–“improper usage or words” (n = 4)
–“wrong form” (n = 1)
–“wrong word” (n = 1)
–“字詞不當 word choice” improper wording (n = 1)

Method
•Students’ written sentences (n=309) were coded
according to whether a collocation error was
corrected or not (i.e., yes or no) (κ = .886, p < .0005)
•Coded students’ written sentences containing a
collocation error (n=171) classified by error type
(e.g., verb–noun, adjective–noun, verb–adverb, and
so on) (κ = .918, p < .0005)
•Coded teacher feedback comments (n=50) for verb–
noun collocation errors (i.e., direct, indirect, and
metalinguistic) (κ = .963, p < .0005)
*Two coders independently coded, third coder used when first coders disagreed.

Method
Feedback Type
Sample Teacher Feedback
Indirect
This is not the right word here. Use a
different word.
Direct
This is not the right word here. Use a
different word
—
“set a good example”.
Metalinguistic
These two words do not go together.
We don’t “do” contributions. What
verb goes here instead of “do”?
Examples of different feedback types given by
teachers for verb–noun collocation errors

Findings & Data Analysis
•Combination of indirect and metalinguistics
feedback (n=1)
•Direct feedback (n=20)
•Indirect feedback (n=27)
•Metalinguistic feedback (n=2)
•L2 writing teachers provided direct and
indirect feedback more often and
metalinguistic feedback less often (
𝜒
2 =
20.367, df = 2, p < .0001)

Findings
•Teachers provided relatively little
metalinguistic feedback
•Sentences tagged by L2 writing teachers as
having a word choice error actually contained
an error that could be attributed to rule-based
grammatical errors
–“I learned so much* different things at his class.”
•(Un)countable nouns

Available Advice in the Literature
•Provide training to L2 writing teachers to
differentiate rule-based and word-choice
errors (Liu, 1998)
–Feedback systems/collocation dictionaries/web
tools can be used to assist teachers through color
coding of feedback tags
•Teachers can provide metalinguistic feedback
–Metalinguistic feedback does not always have to
entail grammar rules (Kao, 2015)

Available Advice in the Literature
•Teachers can focus collocation-related lessons
on incongruent collocations (Bahns, 1993)
•Students can notice collocations
independently when reading (see Lewis, 2000)
–Asking students to notice collocations in a text and their
being able to recall and produce collocations in L2 writing
are two different challenges (Laufer, 1998; Laufer &
Paribakht, 1998)
–Learners used to analyzing language from a grammatical
point-of-view may need several rounds of awareness
raising to aid their noticing of collocations encountered
through language input (Willis & Willis, 1996)

Our Advice
•We suggest execution of L2 writing activities
that systematically combines noticing targeted
collocations in input and then requires
learners to produce the same targeted
collocations as output
–empowers teacher by reducing the potential pool of word-
choice errors and is easy and straightforward to execute
–This approach is informed by Nation’s (2007) four strands
principle that calls for language courses to balance
opportunities for meaning-focused input, meaning-
focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency
development

Incorporating focused written corrective
feedback in an L2 writing activity
Step 1: Provide L2 writing practice through activities intended to draw learners’ attention to
targeted formulaic language (i.e., receptive knowledge) through a pre-activity
Step 2: Provide opportunities for learners to produce the targeted formulaic language (i.e.,
productive knowledge) in L2 writing during activity execution
Step 3: Provide learners direct focused teacher feedback on the written production of
targeted formulaic language in L2 writing

Incorporating focused written corrective
feedback in an L2 writing activity
•In step 1, noticing the structures consciously and
subconsciously helps learners internalize the input so it
becomes intake (Schmidt, 1990; Robinson, 2003)
•In step 2, an activity such as a dictogloss (see Lindstromberg
et al., 2016) or dicto-comp (see Ilson, 1962) provides learners
opportunities to practice the targeted structures and
strengthen other language skills
•In step 3, can be considered the strengthening stage, wherein
learners’ awareness of the targets and attention to feedback
is further raised (Leow, 2001)

Thank you for your attention!
Any questions?
Barry Lee Reynolds
University of Macau
BarryReynolds@um.edu.mo