Past Event

Written corrective feedback practices in Quebec

Dr. Ahlem Ammar
(University of Montreal)

Written corrective feedback (CF) also known as “error/grammar correction” and “negative feedback” has been theoretically and empirically controversial. Since Truscott’s provocative view about CF, many experimental and quasi-experimental studies have been designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of written CF and to compare the effects of two specific CF categories, namely direct and indirect CF. While the former refers to reactions to errors in which the teacher provides the correct form, the latter stands for techniques in which the students are pushed to self correct (ex. through coding the errors). Unlike the oral CF literature in which descriptive research designed to explore how teachers correct errors and how students react to the obtained CF was the foundation of most of the experimental research that followed, the written CF literature barely contained such inevitable descriptive research. To fill out the existing empirical void, the present study sets out to investigate 1)how teachers of French as a second language react to their student’s written errors; 2) the extent to which their feedback varies according to error type and learner proficiency level and 3) how learners use the obtained feedback.

About the Presenter

Dr. Ahlem Ammar is a professor at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Education.

She has undertaken multiple studies about instructed second language acquisition and has supervised more than 20 MA and “Ph.D students whose research covers a multitude of research topics (e.g., pragmatics, corrective feedback, vocabulary learning, teacher beliefs, literacy, etc.).”