This article presents a study of corrective feedback and learner uptake (i.e., responses to feedback) in four immersion classrooms at the primary level. Transcripts totaling 18.3 hours of classroom interaction taken from 14 subject-matter lessons and 13 French language arts lessons were analyzed using a model developed for the study and comprising the various moves in an error treatment sequence. Results include the frequency and distribution of the six different feedback types used by the four teachers, in addition to the frequency and distribution of different types of learner uptake following each feedback type. The findings indicate an overwhelming tendency for teachers to use recasts in spite of the latter's ineffectiveness at eliciting student-generated repair. Four other feedback types—elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, clarification requests, and repetition—lead to student-generated repair more successfully and are thus able to initiate what the authors characterize as the negotiation of form.

Four teachers and their eight classes of 179 fifth-grade (10-11-yearold) students participated in this quasi-experimental classroom study, which investigated the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) and corrective feedback on immersion students' ability to accurately assign grammatical gender in French. The FFI treatment, designed to draw attention to selected noun endings that reliably predict grammatical gender and to provide opportunities for practice in associating these endings with gender attribution, was implemented in the context of regular subject-matter instruction by three of the four teachers, each with two classes, for approximately 9 hours during a 5-week period, while the fourth teacher taught the same subject matter without FFI to two comparison classes. Additionally, each of the three FFI teachers implemented a different feedback treatment: recasts, prompts, or no feedback. Analyses of pretest, immediate-posttest, and delayed-posttest results showed a significant increase in the ability of students exposed to FFI to correctly assign grammatical gender. Results of the written tasks in particular, and to a lesser degree the oral tasks, revealed that FFI is more effective when combined with prompts than with recasts or no feedback, as a means of enabling L2 learners to acquire rule-based representations of grammatical gender and to proceduralize their knowledge of these emerging forms.

This article begins by synthesizing findings from observational classroom research on corrective feedback and then presents an observational study of patterns of error treatment in an adult ESL classroom. The study examines the range and types of feedback used by the teacher and their relationship to learner uptake and immediate repair of error. The database consists of 10 hours of transcribed interaction, comprising 1,716 student turns and 1,641 teacher turns, coded in accordance with the categories identified in Lyster and Ranta's (1997) model of corrective discourse. The results reveal a clear preference for implicit types of reformulative feedback, namely, recasts and translation, leaving little opportunity for other feedback types that encourage learner‐generated repair. Consequently, rates of learner uptake and immediate repair of error are low in this classroom. These results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that L2 learners may benefit more from retrieval and production processes than from only hearing target forms in the input.

This study examines aspects of communicative classroom discourse that may affect the potential of recasts to be noticed as negative evidence by young second language learners. The database comprises transcripts of over 18 hours of interaction recorded during 27 lessons in 4 immersion classrooms at the primary level. The 377 recasts in the database have been classified according to their pragmatic functions in classroom discourse and then compared to the teachers' even more frequent use of noncorrective repetition. Findings reveal that recasts and noncorrective repetition fulfill identical functions distributed in equal proportions and, furthermore, that teachers frequently use positive feedback to express approval of the content of learners' messages, irrespective of well-formedness, to accompany, also in equal proportions, recasts, noncorrective repetition, and even topic-continuation moves following errors. The findings suggest that, from the perspective of both learners and teachers, the corrective reformulations entailed in recasts may easily be overridden by their functional properties in meaning-oriented classrooms.

To investigate the pedagogical effectiveness of oral corrective feedback (CF) on target language development, we conducted a meta-analysis that focused exclusively on 15 classroom-based studies (N = 827). The analysis was designed to investigate whether CF was effective in classroom settings and, if so, whether its effectiveness varied according to (a) types of CF, (b) types and timing of outcome measures, (c) instructional setting (second vs. foreign language classroom), (d) treatment length, and (e) learners’ age. Results revealed that CF had significant and durable effects on target language development. The effects were larger for prompts than recasts and most apparent in measures that elicit free constructed responses. Whereas instructional setting was not identified as a contributing factor to CF effectiveness, effects of long treatments were larger than those of short-to-medium treatments but not distinguishable from those of brief treatments. A simple regression analysis revealed effects for age, with younger learners benefiting from CF more than older learners.