The Effect of Teacher’s Negative Feedback on Learners’ Uptake and Preliminary Intake

Abstract

twofold aim is set for thiscurrent research: to investigate to which extent teacher’s negative feedback moves have an effect on learners’ uptakein terms of their correctness, immediacy and source; and second, to investigatemore in-depth learning or comprehension of the aspects corrected, referred to as preliminary intake. Five separate observations were taken of interaction in a class of 33 Second Year students ofEnglish at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University, Jijel, andtaught by the same teacher. They were followed by tests exploring understanding of the language aspects that were originally corrected by the teacher for the 14 students who made errors.Some negative feedback moves are hypothesized to besignificantly more frequent than others in the classsroom, and have varied effects on learners’uptake (immediate or delayed responses, self-repair, peer repair and needs-repair) and preliminary intake (or comprehension). The results of the investigation revealed that recastsare the most frequently used moves, outnumbering the sum of metalinguistic feedbackand explicit correction; whereas elicitations and clarification requests are only minimally used.As for its effect on students’ uptake,59.5% of negative feedback moveswere found to be assisting students in doing repairs successfuly.Written and oral tests results have shown that negative feedback may not result in long term learning or preliminary intakeof the aspects corrected. However,prepositions seem to have benefited more from teacher’s explicit correction, auxiliary to have and if conditional from teacher’s recasts and possessive adjectives from both explicit correction and recasts, almost equally