Corrective Feedback in English Language Teaching and Learning: Which Way to Go?

The rise in popularity of the communicative approach in language teaching since the late 1970s primarily focusing on language for meaningful interaction and for accomplishing tasks rather than on learning rules has intensified debate among teachers and researchers on corrective feedback or error correction in second language learning. The concept of corrective feedback has been under analysis for long especially since Hendrickson’s study in 1978 in which he questioned if errors should be corrected and if so which ones, when and how the errors should be corrected. Subsequent studies have investigated the types of corrective feedback as well as the use and effectiveness of those types in various contexts and even the impact of those types of error treatment on uptake. Despite these studies, corrective feedback remains one of the most contentious issues in second language teaching and there is no consensus about its application. While some view it as a natural part of the second language learning process that facilitates learning, others view it as a source of feelings of anxiety, apprehension and nervousness that exert a potentially negative and detrimental effect on learning the target language. Despite this contention, corrective feedback is an actuality of second language pedagogical practice in the school setting and is mainly influenced by teachers’ beliefs. At times these teacher beliefs come into conflict with learners’ perspectives. This mismatch can be detrimental to learning thus this study’s attempt at understanding which corrective feedback strategies would be more beneficial for language learning. The study adopts a qualitative approach involving two teachers of English and twenty nine students. It uses qualitative data collection methods including observations, the qualitative semi-structured interview format, focus group discussions and the nominal group technique to investigate the issue. The findings of the study indicate that correction strategies that provide students with clues for them to generate their own repair such as metalinguistic feedback are probably the most beneficial type of correction to the learners. The pedagogical implications are that teachers should embrace correction strategies such as metalinguistic feedback while shunning strategies that simply give the learner the correct answer.