Abstract:

Both language teachers and learners know that grammar is an important part of learning a foreign language; despite controversies on implicit or explicit grammar instruction, teachers teach it, and learners practice and learn it. Almost any grammar lesson is followed by a Controlled Practice (CP), an activity limiting learners’ responses to using a certain grammatical form in response to form-focused questions in order that learners practice using the intended structure until they gradually get the grasp of it, and later, a Freer Practice (FP) giving learners the opportunity to use the recently-learned form in an actual communicative activity such as speaking or writing. Learning a new structure takes some time, and it includes several stages. Learners need to practice what they learn time and again before they can internalize and use it. At the stages of practice and language production, learners naturally produce erroneous forms, which need to be corrected in order for learning to take place. Therefore, teachers often provide learners with corrective feedback on the CP and FP in order to reinforce the presented grammatical points. Immediate error correction maybe used during CP in the form of recast, echoing or the teacher correction, but delayed error correction is more appropriate for FP speaking activity because it doesn't generally interrupt learners’ interaction and fluency practice. For delayed error correction, careful notes of the learners’ errors during their interaction need to be written down within their occurring context; then, these erroneous forms can be put on the board and explicitly corrected at an appropriate time. This study intended to compare the effect of delayed self- and teacher correction of grammatical errors after FPs on the learners’ retention of the same corrected forms in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Two pre-intermediate EFL classes with 18 homogeneous students in each were informed and selected for the purpose of this study. One of the researchers taught both classes for four weeks, and he used the same books and identical teaching techniques for presenting the lessons and covering the syllabus; The delayed error correction after the FPs in one of the classes, the controlled group, was done by the teacher himself addressing the accuracy problems in each erroneous sentence he had recorded while monitoring the learners’ interaction, whereas in the other class, the experimental group, the researching teacher put the erroneous sentences on the board and asked everyone in the class to find the problem with each sentence, discuss the problems with a classmate and finally correct the erroneous forms explaining why they were wrong; the teacher only gave hints to help learners discover the problem for themselves if needed and finally verified the right answer that the learners had collaboratively provided. This went on every session for four weeks and at the end of the 12th session the teacher gave a grammar test whose items had been selected from among recorded errors by the teacher during the course but discussed and corrected differently in each class. Independent samples T-test was used to compare the test results; there was a statistically significant difference between the means of the two groups, indicating that self-correction was more effective than teacher correction in terms of the learners’ correct form retention.

Keywords:

Self Correction, Teacher Correction, Delayed Feedback, Form, Retention.