The general objective of the dissertation is to develop a better understanding of one recurrent practice in formal FL instruction: how teachers react to FL learner output in classroom oral interactions. To this end, the formal features and phenomena involved in Teacher Reaction Episodes (TREs) are addressed.
'Teacher reactions' refer to any instructional strategies that handle learner oral productions. In traditional SLA research, this teacher practice has been conceptually examined under the rubric of 'corrective feedback'.
This thesis covers multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches related to TREs. Video data collected from a case study of two Senegalese international schools illustrate the differential effects of teacher reactions on FL learner uptake. Through corpus-based evidence from three immersion settings, an attempt is made to discover conditions and means for felicitous TREs in acquisitional terms. Learners receiving metalinguistic feedback appear to generate more uptake than those receiving recasts.
