Oral corrective feedback and learners’ uptake in the English-as-a-foreignlanguage classroom: does proficiency play a role?

Treball Final del Màster Universitari en Professor/a d'Educació Secundària Obligatòria i Batxillerat, Formació Professional i Ensenyaments d'Idiomes. Codi: SAP419. Curs acadèmic 2015-2016This project is based on the observation of two classrooms of a high school in Spain (Francesc Ribalta). The purpose was to examine the view both students and teachers had towards oral corrective feedback in the English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL, henceforth) classroom and to evaluate the main differences according to both, the feedback provided by the teacher to deal with an error, and the students’ uptake that we encountered within the two groups studied. Thus, the students who took part in the study were a group of 17 first grade (1st ESO) students and a group of 26 fourth grade (4th ESO) students. Both the findings of research on feedback provided by Lyster and Ranta (1997) in their study about negotiations of form in communicative classrooms as well as my personal concerns about the issue of error correction within the class interaction have motivated the present study, which aims to present a clear pattern on what happens if we compare the reactions students and teachers have against the pattern error-feedbackuptake in different levels of the secondary education. Materials for the present study include a Quick Placement Test that allowed me to classify the level of the students and 12 table sheets to transcribe the different errors that would lead to the final overview of patterns of error treatment. After carrying out the analysis, the results from the present research show that no matter the level of proficiency, the errors made by the students as well as the feedback provided by the teachers and the students’ uptake differed little from one group to the other. Thus, we found mostly grammatical errors which were self-repaired after different types of corrective feedback, especially recasts. The present study belongs to “Modalitat 2”: a research conducted in actual classrooms with valid instruments to collect data, data analysis, discussion of results and conclusion