First Error Correction Class

Today is the first day of SLS 750 seminar. We have 14 students in the class, 4 or 5 or them are Ph.D. students. I expect it to be a great class. Two students share the similar interests with me. Yuki is interested in individual differences and David is in technology.

Interesting things that I learned from the instructor today include:
1. There are two trends of technology mediated error correction:
(1) computer as tutor: Computers give intelligent feedback. Students go through those tutorials one-on-one. It represent the behavioristic approach toward language teaching.
(2) synchronous chat, which more align with more contemporary language teaching philosophy. However the analytic method is more or less a direct copy of that used in analyzing face to face interaction.It seems that multimodality or new literacy approach may better suit as analysis method.
2. The evidence for the effectiveness of error correction is very sporadic. However, it is unlikely that a certain way of doing error correction is a--what's the word, meaning cure for everything?--The questions left to be answered are: when, how and with whom that we should do error correction.
3. The concept of nativeness. Do we give error correction because the learners' production is not native-like? Are the native speakers the standard against whom we should correct our learners? If not, whose standard? Who have the right for the error correction.