Incidental Negative Feedback In Efl Classrooms

It has long been argued that negative feedback plays a role in second language acquisition, especially in contributing to the development of learner's interlanguage and advancing to more targetlike language. However, due to the lack of empirical studies with regard to the true nature and function of NF, its effectiveness is hanging in doubt. From the perspective of teaching pedagogy, many teachers, in fear of discouraging students from speaking, grudge providing NF, leaving the students to their own devices.The purpose of the present research is to examine the effectiveness of incidental negative feedback in meaning-focused speaking activities in EFL classroom setting through comparing the results of oral tests between control classes and experimental classes. That is to say the paper is intended to explore whether teacher's NF directed at students'oral errors in the classroom setting can help improve students'accuracy in later oral performance. The research involved three separate but related experiments to examine the effect of NF in actual classroom teaching environment. These three experiments are designed with some variations so that more comprehensive findings and implications can be drawn.The subjects were six intact classes of about 260 freshmen non-English majors in a key comprehensive university. Two classes (one control class and one experimental class) were taught by the researcher herself and other four (two control classes and two experimental) by her colleagues. All the three experiments lasted about 6-7 weeks. The data were collected from different sources, namely: recording of teacher-student interactions in the classroom, pre- and post- oral tests, two comparative grammar tests, two before and after questionnaires.The major findings of the present research are summarized as follows:1) Students committed grammatical errors the most, then lexical errors, phonological errors and L1 errors. But a vast majority of errors went untreated. L1 errors were treated the most frequently, then lexical errors, phonological errors, and last grammatical errors. That is to say, even though the most frequently occurred errors were grammatical errors, they were not the ones that were treated by the teacher most. On the contrary, they were the least treated.2) Of all the seven types of NFs employed by the three teachers, recast ranked the first. Then came clarification request, repetition, complicated feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, and metalinguistic feedback. The distribution was very uneven, with recast high up in the rank. The last four types were almost negligible. As to the types of NFs following types of errors, recast was the most often used NF for teachers to treat all four types of students'errors. The average successful rate of uptake for the three teachers was higher than unsuccessful rate. Clarification request was the most effective in leading to successful uptake, followed by repetition, recast, and complicated feedback.3) Recast was more effective when it was more consistently, intensely administered and focused on a certain linguistic feature. Short, timely and emphasized recast with pauses and students'awareness helped the students to compare their own erroneous utterance and the targetlike utterance and to notice the gap, and thus led to more successful uptakes.4) Students held positive views towards NF. They were very satisfied with the three teachers'actual NF treatment, including frequency of NF, timing, and the types of errors being treated. They were very positive that teachers'NF had helped them raise their awareness of accuracy and also improved their accuracy. They also held that teachers'NF had helped clarify what their classmates had said. They did not think NF made them afraid to speak, and they thought highly of the effect of NF, and hoped to be exposed to NF in the future.5) NF helped to improve students'overall oral performance, especially the use of past tense which was the grammar focus of the present study. This was proved by the significantly improved oral test scores of the three experimental classes, and students'actual use of past tense in oral tests of Experiment 1.6) NF administered during oral interaction didn't lead to the significant improvement of students'grammar knowledge in written tests for both control and experimental class. This might suggest that NF targeted towards oral errors will not necessarily have significant impact on learners'written grammar knowledge, especially when this grammatical feature is mastered by the learners and it only causes trouble when used orally.In conclusion, incidental NF in meaning-focused EFL classroom can help improve students'accuracy in oral production while it is administered during teacher-student interaction. Findings of the present study can help us to better understand students'beliefs towards NF, the errors committed by the students in oral production in the classroom in relation to error type and frequency, teachers'actual use of NF, and the effectiveness of NF in improving accuracy in oral production, and thus overall oral proficiency.The effectiveness of NF suggests that attention and awareness are crucial in language learning. Learners do have"small cognitive windows"for teachers'NF during teacher-student interaction, and for the interaction between meaning and form. Teachers'NF can raise students'attention and awareness to form and thus have a facilitative role in students'language learning.