EFL learners’ corrective feedback decision-making in task-based peer interaction

Abstract

This laboratory-based research investigated how 40 university EFL learners responded to their peers’ linguistic errors and made their moment-to-moment decisions of whether or not to provide corrective feedback (CF) to their peers’ errors in task-based peer interaction. Data from the transcripts of videotaped pair interaction and audio-taped stimulated recall interviews were utilized and analysed to report the findings. Results showed that learners did not provide CF to their partners frequently and of the three CF strategies, they favoured recast over prompts and explicit correction. Furthermore, more morphosyntactic errors than lexical and phonological errors were provided CF. More importantly, results revealed that learners’ CF decision-making was mediated by six categories of factors: provider-related factors (e.g. providers’ lack of knowledge), receiver-related factors (e.g. receivers’ showing signs of seeking help), task-related factors (e.g. the time of story happening), error-related factors (e.g. salience of errors), and interpersonal factors (e.g. peer relationship). Implications are discussed especially regarding the important role of teachers in raising learners’ language awareness in peer interaction.

Keywords:

• Corrective feedback
• decision-making
• task-based peer interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was noted by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Project of the Ministry of Education of China (grant number 19YJA740011).

Notes on contributors

Jinfen Xu

Jinfen Xu is Professor of the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology where she teaches College English for non-English majors and graduate courses in English pedagogy and second language acquisition. Her main research interests are foreign language education, instructed second language acquisition, learner autonomy and teacher development.

Yumei Fan

Yumei Fan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include classroom interaction and task-based language learning and teaching.

Qingting Xu

Qingting Xu is now a teacher of English in Songjiang Experimental School Affiliated to East China University of Political Science and Law. She received her Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.