Learners' Beliefs as Mediators of What Is Noticed and Learned in the Language Classroom

Abstract

The goal of this study was to determine whether learner beliefs regarding corrective feedback mediate what is noticed and learned in the language classroom. The participants were four groups of high‐beginner college‐level francophone English as a second language learners and their teachers. Each teacher was assigned to a treatment condition that fit his corrective feedback style, and each provided feedback in response to errors with the past tense and questions in the past. Participants ( N = 197) completed a beliefs questionnaire, and half ( n = 99) took part in the intervention that followed. Beliefs were probed using a 40‐item questionnaire, and average belief scores were calculated for each learner. These were then correlated both with the noticing reported on an immediate recall measure and with the test scores on picture description and spot‐the‐differences tasks. The results reveal four common beliefs, two of which mediated the noticeability of the supplied feedback, but none of which impacted the learning outcomes.