Learner responses to corrective feedback for spelling errors in CALL

This article describes a study that investigates learner responses to three distinct types of corrective feedback for misspellings produced by English learners of German. Twenty-eight beginner and intermediate students used an online parser-based system for German that recorded student interaction with the software over 15 weeks. The study considered a corpus of 1268 misspellings and, for the two more explicit feedback types, the system provided correction suggestions for the misspellings. Study results indicate that, while the number of correct responses was significantly higher when the system provided a correction list, there was also significantly less learner uptake for the feedback type that did not provide any correction suggestions. Moreover, learners were far more successful in submitting the target word if it appeared in the suggestion list. Finally, the order in which the words appear in the suggestion list seems to be an influencing factor for students favoring one word over another.