Learner Repair In Response To Immediate Unplanned Feedback In Chinese EFL Dyadic Interaction

The present paper examined the effects of learner repair in response to dyadicinteractional feedback on learning targeted linguistic forms. The focus was on thetwo major types of learner repair: self-generated repair following elicitations andteacher-generated repair following recasts. It also investigated the influences ofdifferent language proficiency and feedback explicitness on the two types of learnerrepair when conducting the error correction immediately after interaction and thenafter one week.40freshmen from a vocational college took part in the dyadicinteraction with their teacher and received two major types of feedback on theirerroneous utterances. The amount of the two types of learner repair duringinteraction was analyzed and then was compared with the degree of error correctionof the same error in individualized delayed test after one week. Analysis of the datashowed that the degree of error correction during the delayed error-correction afterone week has some positive correlation with the degree of immediate learner repair.The results also showed that self-generated repair which outperformedteacher-generated repair on learning targeted language in the delayederror-correction was also a indicator of longer term learning. Although the findingsshowed that explicit feedback played a more facilitative role in eliciting learnerrepair and led learners to conduct the error correction successfully in the delayederror-correction, the effects of feedback explicitness were found to be greater for theself-generated repair than teacher-generated repair. Findings also showed that theeffects of teacher-generated repair reduced over time regardless of students’ differentlanguage proficiency, while the effects of self-generated repair could only sustainedwithin high level and middle level students rather than low level students.