This comparative analysis of teacher-student interaction in two
different instructional settings at the elementary-school level (18.3 hr
in French immersion and 14.8 hr Japanese immersion) investigates the
immediate effects of explicit correction, recasts, and prompts on learner
uptake and repair. The results clearly show a predominant provision of
recasts over prompts and explicit correction, regardless of instructional
setting, but distinctively varied student uptake and repair patterns in
relation to feedback type, with the largest proportion of repair resulting
from prompts in French immersion and from recasts in Japanese immersion.
Based on these findings and supported by an analysis of each instructional
setting's overall communicative orientation, we introduce the
counterbalance hypothesis, which states that instructional
activities and interactional feedback that act as a counterbalance to a
classroom's predominant communicative orientation are likely to prove
more effective than instructional activities and interactional feedback
that are congruent with its predominant communicative orientation.This research was supported by Standard Research
Grants (410-98-0175 and 410-2002-0988) awarded to the first author from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by a
Nihon University Individual Research Grant for 2005 awarded to the second
author. A version of this study was presented at the Second Language
Research Forum held at Columbia University in October 2005. We are
especially grateful to the participating teachers and their students and
also to Yingli Yang for her role as research assistant in aggregating the
datasets. We thank Sue Gass, Alison Mackey, Iliana Panova, Leila Ranta,
and two SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier
versions of this paper.