Faculty Publications

Mitigating Oral Corrective Feedback Through Linguistic Strategies And Smiling

Document Type

Article

Keywords

FTAs, Mitigation, OCF, Politeness, Second language acquisition, Smiling

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume

183

First Page

142

Last Page

153

Abstract

This study reports on the little-examined relationship of mitigation, smiling, and oral corrective feedback (i.e., error correction) in language classrooms. Oral corrective feedback constitutes a staple teaching strategy prevalent in most language classrooms, and it is facilitative of second language acquisition (Mackey, 2020; Nassaji and Kartchava, 2017). Smiling is a known component of facework during instructional feedback (Kerssen-Griep and Witt, 2012; Trees et al., 2009; Witt and Kerssen-Griep, 2011) and has been researched as part of language classroom discourse. The present study is based on approximately 16 h of intact classroom data from seven teachers in three adult language classrooms analyzed for error correction sequences (Lyster and Ranta, 1997), the linguistic sources of mitigation (Caffi, 2007, 2013) in the correction moves, and the facial expression of smiles (Ekman et al., 2002) by the teachers in these sequences. Findings fortify the role of mitigation as an integral part of error correction. The co-occurrence of smiles with linguistic mitigation strategies suggests smiling is a strategy teachers employ in order to mitigate the face-threat in the provision of oral corrective feedback to adult language learners. Further analysis reveals smiling also occurs as a mitigator without any linguistic mitigation.

Department

Department of Languages and Literatures

Original Publication Date

10-1-2021

DOI of published version

10.1016/j.pragma.2021.07.018

Repository

UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa

Language

en

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