Investigating mobile-assisted oral feedback in teaching Chinese as a second language

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an exploratory study investigating mobile-assisted oral feedback in teaching Chinese as a second language (CSL). It is aimed at exploring the characteristics of mobile-assisted feedback on oral production with the smartphone social communication app WeChat as a case in point and examining learners’ perceptions of mobile-assisted oral feedback. A total of 13 CSL learners participated in the study. They were assigned nine discussion topics over the semester and were asked to send their recordings via the WeChat platform. Two native Chinese speakers were employed as research assistants who were responsible for providing the students with feedback based on their oral production. The results show that mobile-assisted corrective feedback is centred on overt correction, mainly targeting the linguistic aspects of grammar and vocabulary, whereas positive feedback is concentrated on affirmation, with content and vocabulary as the most frequently focused linguistic targets. In addition, the findings revealed positive attitudes by students toward mobile-assisted feedback and confirmed the facilitative role of WeChat feedback in enhancing their speaking ability. It is therefore suggested that smartphone social communication apps be applied to foreign language teaching for the provision of feedback and other learning activities.

KEYWORDS:

• MALL
• mobile-assisted feedback
• WeChat
• TCSL

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We also owe special thanks to the research assistants and participants of the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Major Project of the China National Social Science Foundation [grant number 12&ZD224].

Notes on contributors

Qi Xu

Qi Xu is a lecturer at the School of English for International Business, Guangdong Universicy of Foreign Studies, China. She has recently finished her postdoctoral research at the National Key Research Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Her research interests include second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and the application of technology to second language teaching.

Hongying Peng

Hongying Peng is currently an MA student at the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. Her research interest is in second language acquisition and Dynamic Systems Theory.