SLA research: still in the shackles of traditional grammar?

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research also needs a lexical revolution to free itself from the shackles of grammar tyranny. Rant alert!

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I was recently asked to give a talk at a conference on the topic of writing. Since my main area of interest is vocabulary/grammar (i.e. language) rather than developing skills per se, I decided to take a more "lexical approach" to my talk and focus on error correction in L2 writing: both lexical and grammatical. I scoured a lot of research articles to glean the current state of knowledge about error correction or - as it is more fashionable to say today – corrective feedback.

As I expected, the research literature on corrective feedback has been dominated in the past 15 years by the Truscott/Ferris debate. In his thoroughly researched and passionately argued 1996 paper in Language Learning, Truscott famously claimed that error correction is not only ineffective – based on metaanalysis of various studies – it is actually harmful and therefore should be abandoned altogether. His controversial claims were naturally met with a barrage of papers showing how error correction does work – a few of them by Ferris and later on by other researchers – all of which Truscott has methodically dismissed claiming that their studies either had flaws in the design or measured the surface-level knowledge of grammar rules. 

While I would like to save my views on error correction for another post, I just wanted to express my dismay at the total lack of references to lexis in the studies I've looked at – and I have looked at quite a few.

It seems that no matter what side of the debate the researchers are on – pro or anti-error correction (sorry: corrective feedback!) their preoccupation with petty correction of discrete grammar items is plain depressing. It's as though all teachers are expected to correct are tiny little annoying bits of verb grammar and the third person singular –S.

I took about 10 articles related to the Truscott debate and ran a concordancer using AntConc – thanks to Mura Nava for his post "First steps in AntConc". While the word grammar occurred 92 times in my mini-corpus of the research articles (45,000 words), the word vocabulary appeared ... 0 times. Quite predictably, I drew a similar blank with the word "collocation". I struck lucky with "lexical" (20 occurences) but it was still outweighed by "grammatical" (34 occurences)

Although the articles I have accessed – most of them published in System and in the Journal of Second Language Writing – do not include appendices with student compositions, some examples found in the Discussion sections of the articles shed some light on what goes on. Let's look at some of them.

Since part of the debate concerns how errors should be corrected: providing the correct form (direct correction) or simply indicating that a sentence is erroneous (indirect correction) many studies use an error correction code. For example, one study adopts this error correction code attributed to Azar (1985).

I don't see how I suggest you to go with me (the second one in the list above) is an example of a faulty sentence structure. Clearly the problem here is not fully knowing the word "suggest" and how it should be used and not syntax. If anything, the sentence is an example of a good sentence structure because a lot of English verbs follow this pattern

I want you to go with me
I asked him to come with me
I told him to talk to the boss

and the learner probably overgeneralised it to the word suggest.

The only explicit reference to incorrect use of vocabulary is Wrong Word, a category I've always found dubious: wrong as it is used in the wrong context or with the wrong co-text (i.e. collocation)? And the example is:

*He is becoming to mature

Do the authors imply here that the right word should be starting? Or perhaps the problem lies deeper and the learner doesn't know the word "grow up" that could be used instead of the whole phrase "becoming to mature".

Of course, all this is merely a matter of classification. Let's have a look at how some of these studies propose that mistakes should be corrected.

*I didn't understand at first time

The sentence is corrected into "the first time". But why not "at first" which would work just as fine here? The learner must have heard "at first" and tried to use it here. As a result of this deficient correction the learner may assume that "at first" is incorrect too and will stop using it altogether. No wonder error correction gets so much slack from Truscott: instead of fine tuning the learner output and pointing out that at first is sufficient without the word time let's crudely correct so-called errors!

Insert, Delete and Redundant are further categories where such fine-tuning would be in place if we want to provide feedback and not merely correct. But, to tell the truth, despite the use of the pretentious "corrective feedback" I haven't actually seen any positive feedback on students writing in any of the studies. Surely some kind of approval should be given when students use a certain structure or chunk appropriately. For example, I always underline good bits of language when I mark students writing to indicate that they were used appropriately and correctly.

To sum up, if this is the current state of affairs as far as research on error correction in L2 writing is concerned, it is truly lamentable. If that's the way corrective feedback was given in these studies, it is no surprise that it has been shown to have little or almost no effect. I wish that researchers would adopt a more holistic approach to error correction and language learning in general.

For review of some other studies on error correction in L2 writing, see this post by Backseat Linguist