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Language teacher cognition and negative feedback in oral discourse
Author
Swallow, Nicholas Dale
Supervisor
Ng, Chiew Hong
Kiss, Tamas
Abstract
The knowledge and beliefs that guide language teachers in their classroom practices come from a range of interacting and often conflicting sources. Prior schooling and prior language learning experiences link with the input gained during pre-service and in-service professional training to form clear models of behaviour to adopt or to avoid. Added to this is the influence of years of classroom teaching for experienced teachers and the impact that contextual factors have too.
These four factors combine to form teachers’ cognition, which underlies every pedagogical decision they make. One such area of decision making is that of how to give (if at all) negative feedback during oral discourse. When learners produce an untarget-like form during speech, teachers may respond by alerting the learner to the error. This can be done implicitly through recasts or explicitly through elicitation, repetition, or metalinguistic feedback. However, research has shown teachers’ use of negative feedback to vary greatly between individual teachers and contexts, with it often proving to be ambiguous and idiosyncratic.
This qualitative study set out to unpack the complexities of negative feedback by looking at teacher cognition with the aim of gaining a more holistic understanding of what guides teachers in their negative feedback decisions. Six experienced English language teachers in a private institution in Singapore were observed during lessons to identify their use of negative feedback techniques, and interviewed to try to uncover their reasoning behind these techniques.
All teachers were observed to use negative feedback, with explicit elicitation and metalinguistic feedback proving to be the preferred methods. However, there were considerable variations between individual teachers. Upon closer investigation, it was discovered that negative experiences during formal schooling years and positive experiences during adult language learning courses combined to form a strong influence on all six teachers. Professional training had a strong impact on the teachers who came into the profession after a mid-career switch, while those who had been teaching for twenty years or more seemed to view training as less influential. Classroom experience did affect the participants in that it allowed them to create and adopt certain routines which are followed almost automatically when teaching. The final factor, context, had a more subtle impact on the participants. Several of them felt context had little effect, but observing their behaviour and probing their thoughts during interviews revealed that the context, including learner types, assessments, and materials, did carry significance.
These four factors combine to form teachers’ cognition, which underlies every pedagogical decision they make. One such area of decision making is that of how to give (if at all) negative feedback during oral discourse. When learners produce an untarget-like form during speech, teachers may respond by alerting the learner to the error. This can be done implicitly through recasts or explicitly through elicitation, repetition, or metalinguistic feedback. However, research has shown teachers’ use of negative feedback to vary greatly between individual teachers and contexts, with it often proving to be ambiguous and idiosyncratic.
This qualitative study set out to unpack the complexities of negative feedback by looking at teacher cognition with the aim of gaining a more holistic understanding of what guides teachers in their negative feedback decisions. Six experienced English language teachers in a private institution in Singapore were observed during lessons to identify their use of negative feedback techniques, and interviewed to try to uncover their reasoning behind these techniques.
All teachers were observed to use negative feedback, with explicit elicitation and metalinguistic feedback proving to be the preferred methods. However, there were considerable variations between individual teachers. Upon closer investigation, it was discovered that negative experiences during formal schooling years and positive experiences during adult language learning courses combined to form a strong influence on all six teachers. Professional training had a strong impact on the teachers who came into the profession after a mid-career switch, while those who had been teaching for twenty years or more seemed to view training as less influential. Classroom experience did affect the participants in that it allowed them to create and adopt certain routines which are followed almost automatically when teaching. The final factor, context, had a more subtle impact on the participants. Several of them felt context had little effect, but observing their behaviour and probing their thoughts during interviews revealed that the context, including learner types, assessments, and materials, did carry significance.
Date Issued
2017
Call Number
P37.5.S67 Swa
Date Submitted
2017