interactional context and feedback in child esl classrooms

Interactional Context and Feedback in Child ESL ClassroomsAuthor(s): Rhonda Oliver and Alison MackeySource: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 519-533Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers AssociationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1192801 .

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Interactional Context and Feedback in Child ESL Classrooms RHONDA OLIVER School of Education Edith Cowan University Bradford Street Mt Lawley, Western Australia 6050 Australia Email: rhonda. oliver@cowan. edu. au

ALISON MACKEY Department of Linguistics ICC 460 Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057 Email: [email protected]

This article reports on an empirical investigation of the role of interactional context in exchanges between teachers and learners in ESL classrooms. The teacher-learner exchanges were categorized as being primarily focused on content, communication, management, or explicit language. Results suggest that the context of the exchange affected both teachers' provision of feedback and learners' modifications to their original utterances following feedback. Teachers were most likely to provide feedback in exchanges that were focused on explicit language and content; learners were most likely to use feedback provided in explicit language-focused exchanges. Feedback was seldom used in content exchanges and never in management contexts. This study suggests that the importance of the interactional context should not be underestimated when discussing feedback in second language classroom settings.

DURING CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTION, second language (L2) learners have opportunities to receive feedback on their non-target-like output. Feedback obtained during interaction has been demonstrated to have a facilitative role in L2 learning (for a summary, see Gass, Mackey, & Pica, 1998). When feedback is provided in response to learners' non-target-like production, it is generally termed negative feedback. Negative feedback can occur in a wide variety of interactional moves, including clarification requests, recasts, and other forms of negotiation for meaning (Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000).

In Example 1, the teacher uses a clarification request to alert the learner to the fact that there is a problem with her utterance.1 As is often the case with negative feedback during interaction, it is implicit in that it questions the communicative success of the learner's utterance rather than specifying a source or solution to the problem.

Example 1 Clarification Request

The teacher and a small group of students are playing a guessing game; a communication break- down occurs when a student struggles with the pronunciation of fins.

Student: Who has fin? Teacher: Sorry, I beg your pardon? Student: Who has fin [s]?

Implicit negative feedback can also take the form of a recast, where a teacher reformulates a learner's non-target-like form, as in Example 2. Again, however, no explicit metalinguistic information is provided, and the feedback is implicit.

Example 2 Recast

Student: Why did you fell down? Teacher: Why did you fall down? Student: Fall down, yes. A number of studies of classroom interaction

have examined different aspects of feedback provided by teachers. Many of these early studies argued that negative feedback was rarely pro-

The Modern LanguageJournal, 87, iv, (2003) 0026-7902/02/519-533 $1.50/0 @2003 The Modern Language Journal



520 The Modern Language Journal 87 (2003)

vided to learners in native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) interactions (Chaudron, 1977, 1986, 1987; Chun, Day, Chenoweth, & Lup- pescu, 1982; Day, Chenoweth, Chun, & Lup- pescu, 1984). For example, Day et al. (1984) found that out of 1,595 student errors, only 7.3% received feedback from NS interlocutors. In terms of reactions to feedback, Pica, Holliday, Lewis, and Morgenthaler (1989) reported that learners modified their output only 6% of the time after feedback.

More recently, Lyster and Ranta (1997) investigated the relationship between type of feedback and learner uptake in four French immersion classrooms at the elementary level and found that recasts were frequently provided. However, Lyster (1998a, 1998b) argued that recasts were the least effective type of feedback at eliciting modified output by learners, concluding that "recasts tend to be less successful at drawing learners' attention to their nontarget output-at least in content-based classrooms where recasts risk being perceived by young learners as alternative or identical forms fulfilling discourse functions other than corrective ones" (1998b, p. 207). Mackey and Philp's (1998) experimental study of recasts also demonstrated that little modified output tended to occur immediately following recasts, but significantly, they also found that recasts had a beneficial effect on language learning measured through posttests. Mackey and Philp pointed out that modified output immediately following recasts should not be confused with long-term learning and suggested that the research setting might be one source of the difference between their findings and those of studies by Lyster. In a similar study, Van den Branden (1997) investigated the relationship between type of negative feedback and interactionally modified output. Van den Branden found that his child learners of Dutch modified their output in both learner-learner and learner-teacher dyads. However, Van den Branden also noted con- siderable variation in his data, leading him to conclude that context may have had an effect: "Owing to the lock-step type of education they usually received, the pupils were not used to depending upon another pupil, rather than the teacher, for crucial information. This may partly explain the minimal amount of negotiation in some groups" (p. 613).

Other studies have found more positive outcomes following feedback during classroom interaction (Doughty & Varela, 1998; Ellis, Basturk- men, & Loewen, 2001; Mackey, 2000; Mito, 1993; Oliver, 1996, 2000). Ellis et al. (2001), for ex-

ample, investigated English as a Second Lan- guage (ESL) in a private language school in New Zealand and found a high rate of uptake (74%) after interactional feedback. The researchers speculated that their participants, adult students paying to improve their English, might have been "more motivated and more cognitively able to attend to form than Lyster's immersion students" (pp. 311-312). Oliver (2000) also demonstrated positive effects for output following feedback in her examination of the effects of age and pedagogical context on the use of negative feedback. Oliver's study showed that in ESL classrooms, teachers provided a substantial amount of feedback in response to their students' non-target-like production, regardless of the age of their learners, and that the learners made use of the feedback in their subsequent production. Oliver also found that provision and use of feedback varied, depending on whether learners were engaged in teacher-fronted or pairwork tasks. Finally, Mackey's (2000) quasi-experimental study of interaction-driven learning in the L2 classroom investigated the relationship between noticing of feedback and the development of question forms, plurals, past tense, and lexical items. The results showed that the learners who reported more noticing developed significantly more than those whose reports suggested less noticing. Thus, noticing of feedback was associated with learning of L2 form, a finding consistent with Williams's (2001) study of language-related episodes and classroom L2 acquisition.

In summary, the results of studies of interactional feedback have differed, particularly in relation to the findings on the use that learners make of feedback (Nicholas, Lightbown, & Spada, 2001). The conflicting results of classroom feedback studies may be in part due to the fact that there are numerous definitions and coding schema for feedback (as noted by Ellis, 1999; Nicholas et al., 2001; and Oliver, 2000), varying sample sizes (Krashen, 1998), different views on what constitutes use or learning, as well as methodological issues (Schachter, 1998). Another pos- sibility is that the interactional contexts of the exchanges where recasts occurred may have differed. Indeed, there is a growing awareness that the educational context, including the school, program, lesson content, and focus of teacher- learner exchanges, may affect the provision and use of interactional feedback. One of the aims of the current study was thus to explore the relationship between feedback and interactional context.



Rhonda Oliver and Alison Mackey 521

A ROLE FOR CONTEXT?

Although it has been argued that "much research into the process of second language acquisition over the past twenty years has paid little heed to matters of context" (Batstone, 2002, p. 2), the claim that the impact of interaction cannot be assessed without reference to its social and instructional context is not a new one. Kramsch (1985), for example, pointed out that researchers examining teacher-student interaction in the classroom need to consider the instructional context.

In 1992, Slimani found that learner uptake (defined as what learners reported having learned) was influenced by the classroom discourse context in which it occurred. More specifically, Sli- mani (1992) found that her adult learners most often claimed to have learned structures that had been "topicalized" during the lesson, that is, those structures that had been brought to the learners' attention through metalinguistic commentary or error correction. With the finding that learner uptake varied considerably across participants, Slimani concluded that "a consid- eration of the actual classroom interactive work . . . might help us gain a better understanding of the complexities of second language teaching and learning" (p. 216).

Other studies emphasizing the role of context have been carried out by Seedhouse (1994, 1999a, 1999b), who reported that "classroom interaction can best be analyzed and evaluated if it is seen as operating in four basic classroom modes, in each of which typical purposes and patterns of interaction can be seen to converge" (1994, p. 303), and van Lier (1998), who made a similar distinction between learner-learner and learner-teacher interaction and argued that because the two do not present equal opportunities for negotiation, researchers must evaluate interaction within its particular social/instructional context. More recently, D6rnyei and Kormos (2000) suggested that individual and social variables affected oral performance on communicative tasks, and Ellis (2000) has pointed out that even within one classroom, the same activity may be carried out differently depending on the context of how it is performed, for example, with the whole class, in pairs, or in small groups (see also Ellis & He, 1999).

In addition to the social or instructional context, studies have also examined context with respect to the role of the teacher in relation to the class (e.g., Samuda, 2001)2 and the context in which data are collected (Nicholas et al., 2001).

With respect to the latter, Nicholas et al. (2001) noted that "recasts appear to provide more useful input to learners in the laboratory setting than in the classroom setting" (p. 749).

Together, these studies support the claim that has been made for many years by Tarone (e.g., Tarone & Liu, 1995), who has convincingly argued that the study of L2 use in its social context is essential to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) and to the construction of a theory of SLA. These studies also support more recent calls for a more comprehensive examination of the role of context. Hall (2000), for example, has called for further research: "To help us compare the scope and circumstances of contextual conditions . . . the myriad issues connected to classroom interaction and additional language learning in all learning contexts require more extensive examination" (pp. 296-297). Likewise, Breen (2001) has suggested that more attention should be paid to the context of the classroom, suggesting that "if we perceive negotiation for meaning as the catalyst for language development, we need to explore deeper than the sur- face interpretations of an interaction . . . a focus on learner discursive practices within classroom discourse provides a means for doing so" (p. 136).

As even this brief, limited review indicates, there are many different interpretations of "context"-including interlocutor effects, pedagogical settings, social factors, and experimental contexts. The term context, as Kramsch and McConnell-Ginet (1992) pointed out, eludes a simple definition. They described linguistic context, discourse context, social context, and interactional context as all relevant to NNS concerns, while pointing out that "we don't have to drown in the endless relativity of contextual phenom- ena, impossible to capture in the classroom" (p. 13) in part because "teachers are the catalysts that keep the dialogue going; as such they are also what learners make them to be" (p. 21).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In the current study we were interested in whether or not we could reliably identify different interactional contexts, and if so, how these different contexts might contribute to different learning opportunities. Our goal was therefore to investigate the interactional context of teacher-student exchanges in order to explore the provision and use of feedback in different contexts. We addressed the following two research questions:




1. Can distinct interactional contexts be reliably identified by researchers and teachers in teacher-learner exchanges in classroom discourse?

2. If so, does the opportunity for and the provision and use of feedback differ according to the interactional context?

PARTICIPANTS

Five Australian ESL teachers and their students participated in this study. As shown in Table 1, the teachers were all qualified ESL professionals with an average of 7.6 years experience teaching ESL.

The classes were all located within primary school intensive language centers in Australia. Each class had between 10 and 16 students who were between 6 and 12 years old. The students had a variety of language backgrounds, including Austro-Asiatic, Indo-Aryan, Italic, Germanic, and Slavic languages, as well as a number of East Asian and Middle Eastern languages. The students had all arrived in Australia within the previous 12 months.

PROCEDURE

One of the researchers visited each class several times over the period of one 14-week semester to observe a variety of lessons as a nonparticipant in order to gain familiarity with both the teachers and the learners. Video recordings were made on one randomly selected full teaching day (4.5 hours) in each of the five classes. For each class, the first 150 clear and complete three-part exchanges were transcribed so that the database for the current study consisted of a standard number of exchanges for each class. A three-part exchange consisted of a learner's initial utterance, the teacher's response to the learner's utterance, and the learner's reply to the teacher's response. Transcripts were made by one of the researchers, and then checked against the videos by a trained observer.

TABLE 1 Teachers' Experience

Years of Total Years Teacher ESL teaching of Teaching

1 14 33 2 6 27 3 5 8 4 5 6 5 8 17

DATA CODING AND ANALYSIS

Teacher-Learner Exchanges

The first step of the coding process consisted of identifying the learners' non-target-like utterances. Teacher responses to non-target-like utterances were then coded according to whether or not they provided negative feedback, and if so, the nature of feedback they provided. This procedure included coding feedback as either negotiation (including both confirmation checks and clarification requests-see Example 1); recasts (see Ex- ample 2); or explicit feedback (including overt error correction). Next, the teachers' feedback was coded based on whether or not their feedback al- lowed the opportunity for the learners to modify their output. Finally, the learners' responses to the teachers' negative feedback were coded based on whether or not they used the feedback by modifying their output. Intercoder reliability, measured as simple percentage agreement on 100% of the whole data set, was 98.5%. This method of coding based on opportunity, provision, and use of feedback was adopted following Braidi (2002), Mackey, Oliver, and Leeman (2003), and Oliver (1995, 2000) and is illustrated in Figure 1.

Interactional Contexts

Four unique patterns of interactional contexts were identified in the data by the researchers. These context types emerged after discussions of the data based on the Communication Orienta- tion to Language Teaching (COLT) coding system. COLT allows researchers to categorize episodes of input and interaction in the L2 classroom (Spada & Fr6hlich, 1995; Spada & Lyster, 1997).3 These context types were classified as having the following primary foci: (a) content, (b) management, (c) communication, and (d) explicit language.4 The four contexts were identified based primarily on the teachers' responses to learner utterances. In cases where it was possible to class- ify some of the teachers' responses as belonging to more than one of the identified context types, the exchanges were excluded from the corpus. Fewer than 5% of the exchanges were excluded on this basis. The remaining 750 three-part exchanges were assigned to the four categories by two independent, trained raters." Interrater reliability scores were 98.26%. Following these identifica- tions, the researchers' intuitions about the data were triangulated by exploring the classroom teachers' perceptions about the data.6 Using a stimulated recall procedure (Gass & Mackey,




FIGURE 1 Coding Categories

Nontarget Utterances

Feedback Provided

Opportunitites for ...... Modified Output

SModified Output

Note. From "Interactional Input and the Incorporation of Feedback: An Exploration of NS-NNS and NNS-NNS Adult and Child Dyads," by A. Mackey, R. Oliver, and J. Leeman, 2003, Language Learning, 53, p. 47. Copyright by Language Learning. Reprinted with permission.

2000) as soon as practical after the lesson, the teachers viewed videotapes of their own classroom interactions. They were asked to respond to the following prompt: "As you watch, think about what was happening at that time. Try to remem- ber what you were thinking at that time and how you wanted or expected the student to react." The teachers were not provided with any information about the contexts that had been identified by the researchers; they simply viewed the tapes and provided insights into what they had said during the class, based on the question. Each of the comments made by the teachers were identified as: (a) providing support for the researchers' coding categories, (b) providing counterevidence to the researchers' coding categories, and (c) not being relevant to the categories. Examples from each of the categories followed by the teachers' perceptions are shown below.

Content Exchanges. During exchanges where the context was classified as being focused on content, the teacher was usually imparting knowl- edge or eliciting information from the learners about a curriculum, content, or skill area. Con- tent exchanges were typified by the teacher providing content information or asking questions, as in Example 3.

Example 3

The teacher in this example is showing pictures of animals at the beach, the destination for a

forthcoming class excursion. She is asking different students to nominate the name of the animal in the picture she is holding.

S: Octopus? T: No, because an octopus has teeth. S: Jelly fish?

In this example, the teacher corrects the student, by explicitly explaining why the term octopus does not fulfill the requisite semantic properties.

During the stimulated recall sessions, when the tapes they were viewing showed content-focused exchanges, the teachers' comments included the following:

We were doing problem solving in maths. The children were asked to construct a net for a block and I wanted them to solve it for themselves.

I was teaching the class the days and date.

It was the end of a game of concentration and I had earlier been talking about pairs. I established that there were two in a pair. I was reinforcing the vocabulary of the student.

Management Exchanges. During exchanges where the context was classified as being focused on classroom management issues, the teacher was usually talking about the organization of the class or lesson, including turn allocations, students and materials, movement, and reinforcement of appropriate behaviors. Example 4 typifies the management focus exchanges.




Example 4

The following exchange occurred after the teacher had provided instructions for a group task. She explained to the students that they needed to take turns asking each other about the animals they might expect on a visit to the beach. After the instructions, one of the students asked a question:

S: How many? T: What-how many turns? S: No.

In this excerpt, the learner's incomplete utterance was not comprehensible because the refer- ent "how many" was unclear. The teacher refor- mulated the incomplete utterance with a suggestion to complete it, attempting to discover the learner's intended meaning.

During the stimulated recall sessions, when the tapes they were viewing showed management-focused exchanges, the teachers' comments included the following:

Directing the class how to use "Have a Go at Pads." Setting the scene of what is expected of them for the next activity.

We'd just done one activity, getting tidy and packing up for the next activity.

It was typical of what I had to do [in that class], single-word instructions.

I was trying to get her organized.

Communication Exchanges. During exchanges where the context was classified as being focused on communication, the teacher was usually engaging the class in using the L2. Examples included discussions of topics of common interest, sharing news, or debating forthcoming events. The teachers typically asked open-ended questions, to which they did not already know the answers. Sometimes the learners provided extra- curricular information, such as personal information. An example of communication exchanges is provided in Example 5.

Example 5

In a morning news sharing session, one of the learners is describing a bicycle accident that she and a friend were involved in on the previous day.

S: "x" said he ride the bike with "x" and-and he fall in-and then he fall in the bum.

T: Oh he fell down, oh dear. S: And I fall on the botty. ("x" = child's name omitted)

In Example 5 the learner does not use a past tense verb in an obligatory context. This utterance was recast by the teacher in the following turn.

During the stimulated recall sessions, when the tapes they were viewing showed communication- focused exchanges, the teachers reported the following comments: "I was having a conversation within a small group session." "I wanted to find out what the problem was [with a particular student]." "It was something from his own experience.

Explicit Language-Focused Exchanges. During exchanges where the context was classified as being focused on language, the teacher was engaging in an explicit focus on forms. Focus on forms is generally characterized as language instruction based on the grammatical system of the language (Ellis, 2001; Long & Robinson, 1998). In these interactions, the focus of the exchange was formal aspects of the language in use, often with metalinguistic commentary. In the current study, explicit language-focused exchanges were embedded in teacher-led discussions and instruction about English phonology, morphology, the lexi- con (including the meaning of words), and syn- tax, as seen in Example 6.

Example 6

The learners are recounting a story that had been the focus of a number of class activities-hearing the story told, reading the story as a large shared book, dramatizing the story in groups, and drawing and sequencing pictures about the story. In this activity, the teachers' focus was the conventional beginnings and endings of stories.

S: One upon a time T: No we say once. S: Once.

During the stimulated recall sessions, when the tapes they were viewing showed explicit language- focused exchanges, the teachers' comments included the following:

I was teaching pear and pair, that some English words have different meanings, but can sound the same.

[I] repeated new vocabulary slowly and clearly so every student can hear every part of the word.

I was explicit about what was correct.




RESULTS

Research Question 1

Can distinct interactional contexts be reliably identified by researchers and teachers in teacher-learner exchanges in classroom discourse?

First, in terms of the researchers, as noted above, the reliability scores for the researchers and research assistants, who all coded 100% of the data after training, was 98.5% for identification and coding based on the four interactional contexts (as measured by percentage score agreement). Next, in terms of the teachers, their retrospective comments on the videotaped data from their own classrooms indicated that their insights were overwhelmingly consistent with the perceptions of the researchers. The researchers' interpretations of the teachers' comments agreed 99% of the time. However, quantifying these qualitative data is less informative than reading the teachers' own words in the coding section. In many cases, the teachers' comments also shed interesting light on their intentions with respect to the feedback they provided, or reasons for why they did not provide feedback at a given time. For example, in a content exchange, one teacher recalled that "I wanted them to solve [the problem] for themselves," whereas in a management exchange, the teacher noted that "I was trying to get her organized." In both these instances, the teacher was not fo- cusing on linguistic form or accuracy per se, but rather on other aspects of the classroom setting. Likewise, in a communication exchange, the teacher commented that "I wanted to find out what the problem was [with a particular student]," again indicating that other concerns were being given priority over linguistic form. Only in the explicit language exchanges, for example, when the teacher noted that "I was explicit about what was correct," did the teachers suggest that linguistic form was the focus of the interaction.

In summary, the first research question focused on whether distinct interactional contexts could be identified. The answer to this question seems to be "yes" for these data. Two researchers identified the contexts. Two independent, trained raters obtained a very high level of agreement for coding within these contexts. The stimulated recall comments made about their classroom discourse by the 5 teachers were highly consistent with the four distinct contexts identified by the researchers in this study. We now turn to the second research question.

Research Question 2

Do the opportunities, provision, and use of feedback differ according to the interactional context?

Table 2 shows the proportion of the four different types of exchange in the data. As can be seen, content exchanges occurred most often (40%), followed by management exchanges (30%), communication exchanges (20%), and explicit language-focused exchanges (10%).

Because of the categorical nature of the data, they were submitted to chi-square analysis. Signifi- cant differences were found in the opportunity, provision, and use of feedback depending on these interactional contexts as described below.

Opportunities for Feedback to Occur

The opportunity for negative feedback can only occur in response to non-target-like production, therefore, the initial turns of each conversational exchange were categorized in terms of whether they were target-like or non-target-like. As the data in Table 3 show, half of the communication- focused exchanges involved non-target-like initial turns; content, management, and explicit language-focused exchanges began with 26%, 27%, and 28% non-target-like turns, respectively.

Thus, it appears that the opportunities for negative feedback to be provided were nearly

TABLE 2 Occurrence of the Four Contexts

Content Management Communicative Explicit Language M SD M SD M SD M SD

59.4 18.89 46.2 13.59 30.2 10.23 14.2 9.01 % 40% 30% 20% 10% n = (302) (228) (149) (71) Note. Means and standard deviations based on the number of specific context-related utterances produced by the 5 teachers who participated in the study.




TABLE 3 Opportunities for Feedback to Occur in the Four Contexts of Exchange

Content Management Communicative Explicit Language

Non-Target-Like 26%* 27% 51%* 28% n = 77 62 76 20

Target-Like 74%* 73% 49%* 72% n = 225 166 73 51

Total N= 302 228 149 71

X2 (3, N= 750) = 31.86, p = .0001. Note. Cells marked with asterisks were those that contributed to a significant difference (Haberman's residuals greater than + 2 or less than -2).

twice as high in exchanges where the focus was on communication as compared to exchanges focused on content, management, or explicit language. The relationship between context and non-target-like initial turns was submitted to chi- square analysis and found to be significant, X2 (3, N = 750 = 31.86, p = .0001. These patterns are illustrated in Figure 2.

Provision of Feedback

When a learner produces a non-target-like utterance, teachers can respond with feedback. Ta- ble 4 illustrates the provision of feedback on non- target-like utterances in the four different contexts. The relationship between context and the provision of feedback was significant, X2 (3, N = 235) = 17.83, p = .0005.

As can be seen from the data in Figure 3, feedback was provided in all four contexts, although non-target-like utterances produced when the teachers were focused on issues of classroom management attracted less feedback from the teachers than the other three contexts. In these contexts, more than half of all learners' non-target-like productions attracted feedback, with non-target-like utterances in the explicit lan-

guage-focused context attracting significantly more feedback than in any other context.

It is also worthwhile to examine the patterns in the teachers' feedback. Chi-square analysis indicates that there was a significant difference in the type of feedback provided in the different contexts, X2 (3, N = 127) = 30.51, p = .0001, as seen in Table 5.

As Table 5 and Figure 4 show, there was a significantly greater proportion of negotiation in exchanges where the teachers' focus was on communication (34% compared with 12%-18%) than in exchanges in the other three contexts. Recasts were used fairly consistently in content, management, and communicative exchanges (63%-78%) but significantly less (47%) in explicit language-focused exchanges. Finally, although tokens were relatively low for explicit feedback, the patterns show that explicit feedback was seldom provided in content, management, and communicative exchanges (2%-5%), but as might be anticipated, occurred significantly more often in explicitly language-focused exchanges (41%). As illustrated in Figure 4 (and reported by other researchers including Lyster, 1998b), teachers in this study clearly displayed a tendency to use recasts over other types of feedback; however, the proportions

FIGURE 2 Opportunities for Feedback to Occur

* 60-

50-

O 40 0 30

b 20 10-

t M0 Content Management Communicative Explicit




TABLE 4 The Provision of Feedback in the Four Contexts of Exchange

Content Management Communicative Explicit Language Feedback 61% 35%* 54% 85%*

n= 47 22 41 17 No Feedback 39% 65%* 46% 15%*

n= 30 40 35 3 Total N = 77 62 76 20

X2 (3, N = 235) = 17.83, p = .0005. Note. Cells marked with asterisks were those that contributed to a significant difference (Haberman's residuals greater than + 2 or less than -2).

differed according to the context of the exchange. We now turn to the crucial question of whether the actual use of the feedback differed according to the context of the exchange.

Opportunities to Use Feedback

When provided with feedback, if the discourse context is appropriate, learners can use the feedback by modifying their initial output.7 The relationship between context of the feedback and opportunity to use feedback was significant, X2 (3, N = 127) = 24.43, p = .0001. As can been seen from Table 6, learners had the most opportunities to use the feedback they received in explicit language-focused exchanges (76%) and the few- est opportunities in management-related exchanges (13%). Feedback provided in communicative exchanges included opportunities for use 63% of the time compared with only 32% of time in content exchanges. Therefore, the context of the exchange was important when considering opportunities for learners to use the feedback.

Learners' Use of Feedback (Modified Output)

In terms of learners' actual use of the feedback when there was an opportunity to do so, Table 7

and Figure 5 illustrate clear differences according to context. It is apparent that learners used feedback by modifying their initial output most often when it was provided in the context of explicit language-focused exchanges (85%), whereas they never used the feedback that was provided in management contexts. They used the feedback 27% and 38% of the time when it was provided in content and communicative exchanges, respectively. Although it is necessary to exercise caution when interpreting this result because of the low num- bers of tokens, the difference between the use of feedback according to context was significant, X2 (3, N= 57) = 13.22, p = .004.

In summary, these results suggest that different interactional contexts can reliably be identified in the L2 classroom and that the opportunity, provision, and use of feedback can vary according to the interactional context of the exchange.

DISCUSSION

Chaudron (1988) discussed the issue of the wide range of varied categories that exist for class- ifying classroom interaction, pointing out that the existence of multiple systems leads both to problems in validating these different categories and to a lack of comparability in the results. He

FIGURE 3 Teacher Feedback Following Non-Target-Like Production

S100

80

60 `0 40

20

0 C Content Management Communicative Explicit




TABLE 5 The Types of Feedback Provided in the Four Contexts of Exchange


Negotiate 17% 18% 34%* 12% n= 8 4 14 2

Recast 78% 77% 63% 47%* n= 37 17 26 8

Explicit Feedback 4% 5% 2% 41%* n= 2 1 1 7

Total N= 47 22 41 17

X2 (3, N= 127) = 30.51, p = .0001. Note. Cells marked with asterisks were those that contributed to a significant difference (Haberman's residuals greater than +2 or less than -2).

suggested that the solution lies in "a careful development of research on specific sorts of classroom behaviors that would validate their meaningful- ness for L2 learning" (p. 28). Brumfit (1994) similarly pointed out that "a key question for any linguistic analysis is the relationship between the categories of description provided by the linguist and the categories (if any) that are relevant to the participants in the interaction" (p. 30). In an attempt to address the sorts of concerns voiced by Chaudron and Brumfit, we triangulated our data on researchers' perceptions with teachers' insights about the categories. As shown in the Re- sults section, a high level of reliability was obtained. The uniformity of intuitions about the instructional contexts found in the current study is interpretable as evidence of the psychological reality of the contexts, although we do point out

that in the current research, the teachers were the only participants whose perceptions were elicited in relation to the interaction. The child learners' perceptions were not elicited in the current study. Although our findings indicate that interaction may be qualitatively and quantita- tively distinct depending on the teleology of the context in which it occurs, Taylor and Cameron (1987) cautioned against the epistemological leap of assuming that categories can be equated with rules governing behavior. This point was also made by Brumfit (1994) and van Lier (1998). Clearly, the identification of categories in studies such as the current one should be viewed only as descriptive, and it should be clear that not all learners or teachers behave in the same or even similar ways. It is important to emphasize that in this case, the learners' perceptions were not

FIGURE 4 Feedback Types

0 Negotiation M Recasts 0 Explicit Feedback 90

" 80- 78 77

670- S70 63 60 - 50 47

41 P 40

34 o a 30 bO

2 20 17 18 u 12 S10

Content Management Communicative Explicit Content Management Communicative Explicit




TABLE 6 The Opportunity for Learners to Use Feedback in the Four Contexts of Exchange


Opportunity 32% 14%* 63% 76%* n= 15 3 26 13

No Opportunity 68% 86%* 37% 24%* n = 32 19 15 4

Total N = 47 22 41 17


taken into account. The teachers and the learners may have experienced and interpreted the exchanges differently.8

In these data, more non-target-like initial turns occurred in the communicative contexts, where the expression of content seemed to drive a type of relatively unstructured and unplanned interaction than in the other contexts. This finding sup- ports the claim made by Tarone (1979) that learner errors seem to increase when attention is focused on meaning rather than on form. Al- though this interpretation is speculative, it is possible that the nature of the communication-focused exchanges might have increased the cognitive load associated with L2 use and led to more errors. The other contexts, which repre- sented relatively repetitive (management) and more structured (content and explicit language- focused) language use, might be less cognitively demanding.

Interactional feedback that presents opportunities for L2 learning is contingent on problem- atic L2 production. When non-target-like initial turns occurred, there were differences in whether feedback was provided by the teachers,

depending on the context of the exchange. Fol- lowing opportunities for feedback to occur, in the content and communication contexts feedback was provided by the teachers more than half of the time, and 85% of the time in explicit language-focused exchanges. However, in management-focused contexts, only about a third of learners' non-target-like utterances attracted teacher feedback, and even when it was provided in this context, the opportunity for learners to use the feedback was minimal. This minimal use may have resulted because, as their introspective comments suggest, the teachers' goal when focus- ing on classroom management was to set up particular classroom conditions. The teachers may not have viewed the management-focused exchanges as a useful site for learning and thus they rarely provided feedback, and were relatively un- concerned with its use even when they did.

In terms of use of the feedback, the explicit language-focused exchanges led to modified output 85% of the time, whereas feedback in management-focused contexts never resulted in modified output. Possibly, this result is because in the explicit language-focused contexts there was

FIGURE 5 Learners' Modified Output Following Feedback

S90 a 80 70 -

5 60 - 0 50 ,-40

30 -

20 -

10

Content Management Communicative Explicit




TABLE 7 Learners' Use of Feedback in the Four Contexts of Exchange

Content Management Communicative Explicit Language Modified Output 27% 0 38% 85%*

n = 4 0 10 11 No Modified Output 73% 100%* 62% 15%*

n = 11 3 16 2 Total N = 15 3 26 13


an abundance of teacher feedback and thus the teachers' expectations for the learners were quite transparent. It may have also been that the learners were aware that they were expected to modify their original non-target-like forms because of the cueing available in that context, such as the metalinguistic information that often accompa- nied the feedback. It is encouraging that communication-focused exchanges also led to relatively high use of feedback (38%), because it suggests that even the L2 chit-chat that teachers and learners engage in between more formal, planned activities can be beneficial (Mackey & Philp, 1993). Even in content-focused exchanges, the feedback led to modified output in 27% of the instances. These differences are particularly noteworthy when seen in the context of previous studies that have generally tallied use of feedback as around 30% but have not considered the context (for example, Lyster & Ranta, 1997).

Given the fact that the provision and use of feedback differed according to the type of the exchange, it is also worthwhile to note that the nature of the feedback differed according to the context of the exchange. There was a greater proportion of negotiation in exchanges where the teachers' focus was on communication. In explicit language-focused exchanges, feedback was most often supplied in the form of recasts and explicit feedback, and learners often modified their output following these episodes. The contradiction between this finding and those of other researchers (e.g., Lyster, 1998a, 1998b; Lys- ter & Ranta, 1997; Pica et al., 1989) that modified output rarely follows recasts illuminates the importance of considering the context in which feedback occurs and is arguably the most important finding of this research. The data from the current study suggest that learners can and do modify their output following recasts, but much more in certain types of context than in others. The fact that the interactional context in labora-

tory studies can often be more consistent than in classrooms may be another possible reason for why laboratory studies have generally shown more positive effects for recasts than classroom studies. Earlier classroom feedback studies have generally not differentiated between the different contexts of exchanges. An important excep- tion is Pica's (2002) study of content-based (film and literature) classrooms. In reference to discussion, the most frequently implemented interactional activity in the classes she investigated, Pica stated that "as a task for L2 learning, it falls short of meeting conditions that satisfy learners' needs for positive, and particularly, negative evidence, relevant to L2 learning" (p. 16). Pica also pointed out that although negative feedback might not be provided, classroom interaction may still offer other helpful data for learners' input and output needs, a caution that we echo here.

Seedhouse (1994, 1999a, 1999b) and van Lier (1998) also suggested that classroom contexts in which learning episodes are embedded influence the presence of instructional features. The findings reported in the current study support these suggestions, as well as Kramsch's (1985) assertion that the L2 classroom is a social context in its own right and that interaction in the language classroom cannot be understood without taking contextual factors into account. As Allwright (1980) asserted there is a need to gain insights "into how classrooms work and how learners contribute to their own and to each other's learning" (p. 186). Furthermore, Breen's (1996) claim that different learning outcomes "will have to be explained with reference to the context in which the learning occurred so that input, process and outcomes are seen as an extension of how the learners variously defined that context and acted in it" (p. 86) is also supported by this study.

In sum, the provision of feedback by teachers and the opportunity for use of such feedback by learners were affected by interactional context in




the current study. These findings point to the desirability of more finely-grained analyses by SLA researchers investigating the role of feedback in the L2 classroom. Researchers who have found relatively low levels of feedback and modified responses (e.g., Foster, 1998; Lyster, 1998a, 1998b) might gain more insights into their data by considering the interactional context within which exchanges occur.

LIMITATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

This study suggests that learners may encoun- ter different linguistic environments depending on the interactional context, in that the provision and immediate use of feedback differ depending on interactional context. These findings indicate that interaction research might benefit from rec- ognizing that contextual variables can affect the amount and nature of feedback and the extent to which feedback leads to modified output. How- ever, this research has only examined the presence or absence of these features in different contexts. Further research is required to evaluate the developmental implications of these findings. Several important limitations should be noted. First, the sample size in our study was relatively small. We observed only five ESL classrooms, including 72 learners and their 5 teachers. Teach- ers with different instructional styles, for example, might use feedback differently in various instructional contexts. The learners in the current study were children at a low level of proficiency. Adolescents, adults, and any learners with different proficiency levels might behave differently. Teachers and learners in a foreign language context, or using different instructional materials, might behave differently. The use of different pair and small group activities also might affect patterns such as those described here. Although one of the researchers visited the classrooms on several occasions, the potential effect of observation on the data cannot be over- looked.

The teachers' insights about the exchanges that were used to triangulate the researchers' perceptions of the data should be interpreted cau- tiously. The reliability of this sort of retrospective self-report data is subject to concerns involving the time interval, memory decay, and the highly interpretive nature of such data (Gass & Mackey, 2000).

Finally, as Brown, Malmkjaer, Pollitt, and Wil- liams (1994) pointed out "there is, of course, the notorious problem that 'context' is a notion which seems to be impossible to constrain" (p. 6);

our operationalization of context was necessarily simplistic and referred only to the immediate discourse. It would be desirable to replicate this study in different classroom and language contexts, with a range of learners carrying out different sorts of activities. Our study underscores the point made some time ago, that we should not overgeneralize from one learner or teacher, or one learning context to others without exercising caution (Hatch, 1979). And, of course, we did not assess learning outcomes, which should be a criti- cal component of future investigations of the role of context in second language research.

NOTES

1 All examples are taken from data collected for the current study.

2 Foster's (1998) claim that negotiation seldom occurs in L2 classrooms is open to questions based on the setting for her research. Experienced classroom teachers usually act to keep their classroom learners "on task" and create contexts for negotiation to take place. Fos- ter's report suggests that she used a more hands-off approach, refraining from realistic teacher-student interactions with her students so as not to impact her research. However, this may have made her classroom more comparable to an artificially controlled laboratory setting than to an authentic classroom.

3 We first tried COLT, and when it proved difficult to apply to our data, we devised our own system. In an attempt to address the sorts of concerns voiced by Chaudron, we triangulated researchers' perceptions with teachers' insights about the categories. In our ongoing work, we are using these categories with adults and eliciting the adult L2 learners' perceptions, as well as those of the teachers.

4 In devising these categories we also considered van Lier's (1998) suggestions that most lessons include ele- ments of a range of organizational sources and resources such as social context, ritual, institutional/cul- tural, cognitive, and methodological resources.

5 In order to promote independence and reliability, these trained raters were not the authors (who had identified the categories).

6 Although we believe learners' perspectives are both interesting and important, they were not elicited in this study. Obtaining introspective data from our low proficiency child ESL learners would have taken more time than was available and would have been too disruptive to the classroom procedure. In addition to these practical constraints, we believed that the learners' young ages might have constrained our ability to collect and interpret such data. Research such as Mackey's (in press) study of adult learners' perceptions about interaction in different settings suggests that learners' insights are valuable supplements to production data.

7 As Oliver (1995) has demonstrated, learners do not




always have the opportunity to use feedback in the immediate discourse. Sometimes, the interlocutor provides feedback and then moves on in terms of topic, and it is not communicatively appropriate for the learner to modify his or her original non-target-like utterance in that turn.

8 In our ongoing work, we are using these categories with adults and eliciting the adult L2 learners' perceptions, as well as those of the teachers.

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