Corrective Feedback

Whenever instructors corrected my mistakes, it was never one feeling that was provoked. For example, in my Japanese FIU class, my instructor always corrected mistakes that pertained to a lesson we were immediately covering in class or grammar we had covered in previous classes. She did not go over every mistake. She pointed out grammatical errors that were really salient and interrupted smooth communication of meaning.

However, my Japanese instructor in Japan would sometimes provide corrective feedback, but mostly just gave a puzzled look when I said something erroneous. Unfortunately, sometimes I was aware of the mistake and other times I did not notice it. For the times I didn't notice, he'd spend a few seconds waiting for some type of answer, realized I wasn't sure what to say and then moved on to the next student or part of the lesson.

My Spanish teacher in high school corrected every single one of my mistakes, but my college Spanish teacher corrected very few of my mistakes (I'm not sure whether it was because I was better at Spanish or if that was just her style). The latter teacher tended to correct my pronunciation (again, maybe a sign my Spanish was actually getting better. Otherwise, she was sending me the wrong message).

As we have learned, providing corrective feedback is "a dynamic and individual process, and sometimes the immediate effect of feedback will not be observed." In comparison to handling vocabulary and grammar, we must take into consideration that one method is not enough and each individual is more respective to some methods (types of feedback) than others. As such, we must keep in mind that the SLA is a gradual process and we must express this to our students. If we send the message that's it's not okay to make mistakes, then they may never want to even try to speak the language ever again.

It's through mistakes/errors that we learn, no matter what discipline, and it's through discovering the gap between the target form and the erroneous form on their own that they are much more likely to retain the information. Therefore, it's not necessary to correct every mistake every student makes not only because not all errors are the same, but the students may be capable of self-correcting.