Innovation in Language Learning

Corrective feedback and its massively increasing importance in the context of education have been widely accepted to have a crucial role in demonstrating language learning and maximizing the benefits on how errors are properly handled or supervised. Language learning is sustainably attained and error corrections and feedback are appropriately supervised when vivid understanding and experience of the various modes of learning interaction and contextual diversity can be achieved by language teachers. Recently, offshore outsourcing of synchronous computer- mediated communication or online teachers has become a booming international business. Unlike the usual encounters in a face-to face classroom interaction, gestures, body language are pretty much absent in online English learning context. Thus, interactional discourse patterns have been deemed to gradually form in distance learning speech community and have been shaping the social relationship of interlocutors particularly between teachers and students, the language functions and the very nature of discourse in this pedagogical environment. In this study, 20 online classes (10 from beginner and 10 advance classes) have been collected from the Philippines and transcribed in 2015-2016. From these data, samples of online classes between the Filipino online teachers and EFL online learners have been extracted, and analysed for the classification of errors, corrective feedback and student uptake; the findings reveal the discourse nature of synchronous computer-mediated communication between teachers and student and could likely support the training and services offered by this developing pedagogical industry of learning the English language.

Keywords: Synchronous computer-mediated communication, corrective feedback, student uptake, discourse markers