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External Task-Repetition: the Role of Modality, Written Corrective Feedback and Proficiency

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External Task-Repetition: the Role of Modality, Written Corrective Feedback and Proficiency UNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA ESCUELA INTERNACIONAL DE DOCTORADO External Task-repetition: The Role of Modality, Written Corrective Feedback and Proficiency. A Comparative Study Repetición Externa de la Tarea: el Papel de la Modalidad, la Respuesta al Escrito, y la Competencia Lingüística. Un Estudio Comparativo D. Alberto José Sánchez López 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................................................................................I Roadmap to the reader. .............................................................................................................III PART I. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ..........................................................................................1 CHAPTER I. TASK-BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING...........................................2 I.1. GENESIS OF TASK-BASED LANGUAGE AND TEACHING. ................................................2 I.2. THE CONCEPT OF TASK. .................................................................................................3 I.3. LANGUAGE LEARNING THROUGH TASKS. .....................................................................6 I.4 THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS FOR TASK-BASED LANGUAGE AND TEACHING. ..........8 I.5 OUTPUT PRODUCTION ACROSS MODALITIES: ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE. ......12 CHAPTER II. TASK REPETITION AND LANGUAGE LEARNING. ................................................32 II.1 RATIONALE FOR TASK REPETITION IN THE ORAL MODALITY. ....................................33 II.2. TASK REPETITION IN WRITING: NEED TO EXPAND RESEARCH AND TENETS. ............35 II.3. MEDIATING FACTORS IN TASK REPETITION: THE CASE OF LEARNER PROFICIENCY. .36 CHAPTER III. ANALYSIS OF RELEVANT EMPIRICAL RESEARCH. .............................................38 III.1. RESEARCH ON TASK-MODALITY EFFECTS. .................................................................38 III.2. RESEARCH ON TASK REPETITION IN THE ORAL MODALITY. .....................................40 III.3. RESEARCH ON TASK REPETITION IN WRITING. .........................................................44 III.4 RESEARCH ON WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK. .....................................................46 PART II. THE EMPIRICAL STUDY .................................................................................................53 CHAPTER IV. AIMS, HYPOTHESES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS. ...........................................54 IV.1. HYPOTHESES. .............................................................................................................55 IV.2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS. .............................................................................................55 V. METHOD. ...........................................................................................................................57 V.1 PARTICIPANTS. ............................................................................................................57 V.2. TASK AND PILOTING. ..................................................................................................58 V.3. INSTRUMENTS AND DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURES. .............................................60 V.4. DATA CODING AND ANALYSES. ..................................................................................63 VI. RESULTS ............................................................................................................................75 VI.1. TASK REPETITION ACROSS MODALITIES (ORAL/WRITING) AS MEDIATED BY PROFICIENCY. .....................................................................................................................75 VI.2. TASK REPETITION AS MEDIATED BY DIFFERENT TYPES OF WCF AND PROFICIENCY. ...........................................................................................................................................90 VII. DISCUSSION. ..................................................................................................................118 VII.1. TASK REPETITION ACROSS MODALITIES. ...............................................................118 VII.2. TASK REPETITION AS MEDIATED BY WCF. .............................................................128 VIII. CONCLUSION. ...............................................................................................................135 VIII.1. SUMMARY OF THE RATIONALY OF THE STUDY. ...................................................135 VIII.2. SYNTHESIS OF MAIN FINDINGS. ............................................................................136 VIII.3. CONTRIBUTION OF OUR RESEARCH. .....................................................................138 VIII. 4. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS..............................................................................140 VIII.5. LIMITATIONS TO OUR STUDY AND FUTURE RESEARCH. ......................................141 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................144 RESUMEN .................................................................................................................................162 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful to all those people who supported me during the process of writing the present doctoral dissertation. Having them beside me gave me the necessary strength to carry on. Therefore, they deserve the thoughts and feelings I shall render in the following lines. First and foremost, I cannot really express my gratitude to my supervisor, Rosa M. Manchón Ruiz, and my co-supervisor, Roger Gilbert Guerrero. I would like to thank them for giving me the opportunity of conducting my research with them, for tutoring and guiding me throughout these years and for their thorough revisions of the present manuscript. Should any errors remain, these are entirely my own. Rosa and Roger have been role models both professionally and personally, who have helped me to grow in these two facets of life. I really appreciate their help and support at every stage of this process and their companionship at international conferences where I had the opportunity to meet their colleagues and other scholars, whose comments were always stimulating and thought-provoking. Also, I wish to thank the rest of colleagues in the research group, most of them in the University of Murcia and some others in the University of Barcelona, who were always supportive and treated me as another fellow member of the group. It was a pleasure to learn from them all. Special thanks to Lena Vasylets, who always welcomed me in the University of Barcelona and trained me in data analysis and, to Javier Marín and Miguel Ángel Pérez, without whom statistical analysis would have been much harder and time-consuming. I also want to show my gratitude the rest of PhD students I met along the way, who were always willing to lend a helping hand when necessary and shared hilarious moments and laughs in conferences, Jose Ángel Mercader, Sophie McBride, Belén Moreno, María Dolores Mellado and, especially, Belén González, who endured stressful moments with me during this summer and always relieved the pressure with her gentle touch. I also would like to thank Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (FFI2012-35839 and FFI2016-79763-P) and Fundación Séneca (19463/PI/14) for financing my attendance to international conferences and my training for data analysis in the University of Barcelona. Last but not least, I am grateful to all my family and friends, particularly my parents, Mercedes and Arnelio, who understood my academic, professional and personal situation and never stopped believing in me. They were always there to listen and had some piece of advice to cheer me up in difficult moments. I thank them all for their patience, understanding and encouragement during these five years. I II Roadmap to the reader. Throughout the world, millions of learners are asked to speak and write in their second language classroom. It is a well-known fact by now that the type of task and the conditions under which it is performed will largely determine oral, written and learning outcomes in general, while language learners and language teachers alike contrive to make the most out of them. From their struggle to master and to teach how to master a language, stems the importance of investigating tasks both in oral and written domains and exploit the language learning opportunities the two modalities afford. Ours is, therefore, a further building block on the trailbreaking path initiated previously by some scholars (see Byrnes & Manchón, Eds., 2014a) to make writing practices more central in the pursuit of second language acquisition. The present doctoral dissertation is organised in two parts with eight chapters in total. Part I comprises three chapters that offer the necessary background to the empirical study that is presented in Part II, which again consists of five chapters. In Chapter I, the theoretical underpinnings for Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching is presented as the necessary background for our study, with a special emphasis on the language learning possibilities of output production in the two modalities. Additionally, the concept of task is also addressed. Moving onto Chapter II, the rationale for task repetition, which is the key construct under study in this thesis, is presented as it was theorised in the oral mode. Following, we problematise the concept of task repetition in its application to the written mode, and we pay special mention to the potentially mediating role of the learner
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