Kaluhi Kaʻapana

ITE 320

Dawn Furushima

4 October 2019

Critical Reading Paper #4

This week’s readings focused on the studies of learning and teaching in a second

language classroom. Chapter five talks about different types of corrective feedback in the

classroom. This was interesting to read about because in Hawaiian immersion schools, we often

use some of these corrective feedback strategies. When I think back to the type of corrective

feedback I give to my students, I often use recasts. This is the “reformulation of all or part of the

student’s utterance, minus the error” (Lightbown & Spada, p. 140). Student uptake, in this

method, does not occur often. I have noticed that when I use recast, student uptake is rare. One

example of a recast used in my classroom is with the sentence pattern, loaʻa. Loaʻa iaʻu ka

penikala (I found the pencil) is grammatically correct. The students often say, loaʻa au i ka

penikala (the pencil found me). When the students say “loaʻa au i ka penikala,” the teachers often

respond with, “loaʻa iā ʻoe ka penikala?” The students don’t always self-correct. When I use

repetition with metalinguistic feedback, however, I noticed that the students respond well and

self-correct. I think this is because there is an explanation that gives the student an understanding

of why their sentence is grammatically incorrect.

Chapter six had made many important points with the proposals and really had me

thinking about the second language learners in my life. To start with my own experience, I

learned the “get it right from the beginning” way. I learned though grammar-translation, then
was later immersed in a communicative teaching approach. Personally, I don’t think learning this

way was helpful. It was difficult to learn how to hold a conversation when I was so busy thinking

about what I was saying in a grammatical way. I agree with the statement, “language is not

learned by the gradual accumulation of one grammatical feature after another” (Lightbown &

Spada, p. 156). I agree with this statement because many second language learners I know that

learned L2 in a similar approach as I, still are not able to converse with native speakers. On the

other hand, I know students who have gone through immersion settings and still have difficulty

correcting their grammatical errors now, in their adult life. I also know some second language

learners who attended Hawaiian immersion schools, then learned in a grammar-translation

approach in college, and came out successful in the end. With all these thoughts, I wonder which

proposal truly works best. I also wonder if it is dependent on the student, as not all students learn

the same way. I am interested to keep reading about these case studies, as well as studying my

own students and the second language learners around me.