A Contrastive Study of Feedback

This book deals with one of the essential aspects of classroom discourse analysis: feedback in the teacher-student exchange. We first offer a theoretical background describing some important aspects such as the different approaches to discourse analysis and the characteristics of classroom discourse. We then examine several studies published in relation to correction. In the research part we describe the subjects of the study: six lessons were audiotaped in two different schools, at two different levels and with teachers who had different characteristics. We show the results concerning aspects such as the length of the corrective exchanges, the types of errors and corrections, and the acceptance of teacher's correction on the part of students. Our study of the incidence of error and correction should help shed some light on the field of language teaching and learning and leads us to adopt a positive attitude towards students' mistakes. The analysis should be especially useful to professionals in the educational field and researchers in discourse analysis.