Learners make mistakes. They make mistakes when they’re learning to ride a bike, learning math, learning history – and most noticeably when they’re learning a new language. How teachers respond to these mistakes by way of corrective feedback (CF) is part and parcel of their learning experience.

One would normally say here that “there’s been considerable debate on this topic” – but while that’s true from a scholarly perspective, in my experience there is a profound disconnect between the research on CF and what teachers actually do. Many (most?) teachers come into the classroom with an intuitive sense of how one should respond to student errors, and most teachers feel quite strongly about it.

But does the research into language learning support those intuitions? This seminar is designed to look at current research on corrective feedback and apply it critically to classroom language instruction. We will look at three domains of work on this topic:

• CF for spoken output
• CF for pronunciation
• CF for written output

Embedded in the seminar will be a real-time observation of a Princeton University language class, after which seminar participants will discuss what they saw in light of our discussion of the first two domains above. The seminar will then move to the thorny issue of CF for written feedback, which has been the focus of sustained investigation for decades.

While the seminar not designed to be a workshop with “practical ideas for Monday morning,” my hope is that it will lead to reflections on one’s teaching that will have a profound effect on “Monday morning” and every morning thereafter.