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35 - Corrective Feedback and Grammatical Complexity: A Research Synthesis

from Part VIII - Individual Differences, Tasks, and Other Language- and Learner-Related Factors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

By
Gisela Granena  and
Yucel Yilmaz
Edited by
Hossein Nassaji  and
Eva Kartchava
Hossein Nassaji
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia
Eva Kartchava
Affiliation:
Carleton University, Ottawa
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Summary

This chapter reviews corrective feedback studies that focused on the effectiveness of oral corrective feedback on specific morphosyntactic targets in English as a second language. Specifically, this chapter addressed the question of whether the grammatical complexity of the target structure investigated affects the effectiveness of corrective feedback as an instructional intervention. Not only was complexity defined on the basis of formal criteria, but it also incorporated a semantic component from the perspective of the redundancy and transparency of the form–meaning mapping. Eleven studies published between 2006 and 2018 qualified for the research synthesis. The overall findings indicated that, in general, corrective feedback is more effective for simpler grammatical features. The chapter concludes that type of language feature is a relevant dimension to consider in the effectiveness of corrective feedback. The chapter calls for future research on the role of grammatical complexity using categorization methods that consider both formal and semantic complexity features.

Keywords

Grammatical complexitysemantic complexitytarget structurelinguistic targetform-meaning mapping
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Corrective Feedback in Second Language Learning and Teaching , pp. 754 - 776
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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