Oral corrective feedback and the acquisition of Chinese rule-based verb constructions

183 Pages·2016·4.34 MB·English

University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
2015
Oral corrective feedback and the acquisition of
Chinese rule-based verb constructions
Zhengwei Qiao
University of Iowa
Copyright 2015 Zhengwei Qiao
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1730
Recommended Citation
Qiao, Zhengwei. "Oral corrective feedback and the acquisition of Chinese rule-based verb constructions." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2015.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1730.
Follow this and additional works at:http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of theFirst and Second Language Acquisition Commons
ORAL CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK AND
THE ACQUISITION OF CHINESE RULE-BASED VERB
CONSTRUCTIONS

by
Zhengwei Qiao

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Second Language Acquisition
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

May 2015

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Chuanren Ke
Copyrights by
ZHENGWEI QIAO
2015
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
___________________________

PH.D. THESIS
___________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Zhengwei Qiao

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor
of Philosophy degree in Second Language Acquisition at the May 2015 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ________________________________
Chuanren Ke, Thesis Supervisor

________________________________
Helen Shen

_________________________________
Judith Liskin-Gasparro

_________________________________
Michael Everson

_________________________________
Weldon Coblin
I dedicated this dissertation to my dear husband, Lingjian Meng, who
provided love, support, and inspiration.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I once heard that it took a village to make a Ph. D. My journey of writing this
dissertation confirmed these words. I could not finish my dissertation without my Ph. D.
“village.”
I want to first express my heartfelt gratitude to my advisor Professor Chuanren Ke.
I thank him for his encouragement and support throughout my graduate studies. His
knowledge of pedagogy and second language acquisition has been a true inspiration. His
constructive advice kept pushing the boundaries of my thinking and made my dissertation
writing oriented and focused.
I am grateful to Professor Judith Liskin-Gasparro for being my role model. Her
SLA-Speaking class has introduced me to the field of error correction on students’ speech,
which became my primary research interests.
Special thanks go to Professor Helen Shen. I am indebted to her for introducing
me to many instructional skills in Chinese teaching and generously supporting me in my
data collection. I am also grateful to her for giving me the opportunities of teaching
Chinese in the Chinese program.
I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Michael Everson
and Professor Weldon Coblin for kindly serving on my dissertation committee. I thank
them for their insightful comments and suggestions throughout the course of this project.
My Ph.D. “village” also includes the students at the University of Iowa who
participated in this study. The experiment lasted over seven weeks. Without the students’
engagement and support, this project would not have been possible.
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Last but not least, I want to thank my family: my husband, my parents, my sister,
and my brother. I thank my husband, Lingjian Meng, for his caring, love, and support. I
would not have come this far without him. I thank my parents for their love, and my
brother and sister for always taking care of my parents while I am far away from home.

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ABSTRACT
Research has focused on how the effects of different types of feedback vary as a
function of the complexity of the linguistic targets and on the learning of inflectional
features. However, few studies have investigated the learning of rule-based verb
constructions. Grounded in the interactionist approach and usage-based theory, this study
investigated the effects of corrective feedback on the acquisition of rule-based and rote-
learning verb constructions among English-speaking learners of Chinese. Specifically,
this study examined the effects of input-providing feedback and output-prompting
feedback on the learning of two verb constructions.
Data were drawn from 18 learners of Chinese from second-year Chinese classes
in an American university. The participants were divided into two groups and took a
pretest, treatment, and two posttests. Learners also filled out a questionnaire about their
perception and preference of feedback types. Contrary to previous research, results
indicated that both recasts and metalinguistic clues had positive effects on learners’
learning of the target constructions. Moreover, learners of different proficiency in the
target constructions preferred different types of feedback. The study results provided a
categorization of rule-based verb constructions based on the rules that govern their
formations and identified stages learners moved through when learning verb
constructions. The researcher proposed an instructional model of rule-based verb
constructions. The model will help instructors recognize the stage the learners’ are in and
provide insight into how to help learners move to a higher stage by providing appropriate
instruction, corrective feedback, and practice activities.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES ...................................................................................................... viii
LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... ix
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................1
1.1 The aim of this study .....................................................................................1
1.2 Research design ............................................................................................3
1.2.1 Subject population .............................................................................3
1.2.2 Study procedures ...............................................................................4
1.3 Significance of the study ...............................................................................5
1.4 Organization of the dissertation .....................................................................7
CHAPTER 2 LEARNING OF DIRECTIONAL VERB COMPOUNDS.......................8
2.1 Theories of motion events .............................................................................8
2.1.1 How languages differ in motion events encoding ............................. 10
2.1.2 Revised typological categorization of motion events ........................ 11
2.2 Chinese directional verb complements ........................................................ 12
2.2.1 Compositional properties of DVCs................................................... 13
2.2.2 DVCs constraints ............................................................................. 16
2.3 Acquisition of directional verb complements ............................................... 19
2.3.1 L1 influence in acquiring L2 motion events ..................................... 20
2.3.2 Usage-based theory .......................................................................... 23
2.3.3 L1 and L2 acquisition studies of DVCs ............................................ 26
2.4 Summary..................................................................................................... 28
CHAPTER 3 RECASTS AND METALINGUISTIC CLUES .................................... 30
3.1 Interactionist theories of language learning ................................................. 30
3.2 Skill Theory ................................................................................................ 33
3.3 Oral corrective feedback ............................................................................. 35
3.3.1 Types of corrective feedback ........................................................... 35
3.4 Recasts and metalinguistic clues .................................................................. 37
3.4.1 Noticing of recasts ........................................................................... 40
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3.4.2 Implicit knowledge and output-prompting feedback ......................... 43
3.5 Studies comparing recasts and prompts ....................................................... 44
3.5.1 Learner-internal factors .................................................................... 48
3.6 Summary..................................................................................................... 51
CHAPTER 4 METHODOLOGY ............................................................................... 53
4.1 Research questions ...................................................................................... 53
4.1.1 Linguistic issues .............................................................................. 53
4.1.2 Pedagogical issues ........................................................................... 54
4.2 Research design .......................................................................................... 56
4.2.1 Participants ...................................................................................... 57
4.2.2 Target constructions ......................................................................... 58
4.2.3 Data collection procedure................................................................. 61
4.2.4 Treatment ........................................................................................ 62
4.2.5 Operations of recasts and metalinguistic clues .................................. 65
4.3 Assessment ................................................................................................. 67
4.3.1 Oral production test ......................................................................... 67
4.3.2 Questionnaire ................................................................................... 71
4.4 Data analysis ............................................................................................... 72
4.4.1 Data analysis for research questions ................................................. 72
4.4.2 Raters and rating reliability .............................................................. 73
4.5 Pilot study ................................................................................................... 74
CHAPTER 5 RESULTS............................................................................................. 75
5.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 75
5.2 Findings for research question 1 .................................................................. 75
5.2.1 Activity verb production tests .......................................................... 76
5.2.2 DVC production tests ....................................................................... 78
5.2.3 Summary of findings for research question 1 ................................... 83
5.3 Findings for research question 2 .................................................................. 86
5.3.1 Pretest error types ............................................................................ 87
5.3.2 Posttest error types ........................................................................... 89
5.3.3 Challenging items on the DVC production tests ............................... 93
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