The Efficacy of Drilling Backchannels in a CLT Context : A Corpus Analysis of Japanese ESL Learners

The present study takes an exploratory look at how choral repetition of targeted backchanneling phrases affected learner production in spontaneous discussion.Choral repetition as a pedagogical technique is used sparingly in communicative language teaching (CLT) classrooms but may still have a role, as backchanneling has been identified as a discourse level skill deficiency among native Japanese speaking ESL learners.The (Rikkyo English Discussion) RED Corpus of learnerlearner English discussions was used to assess the quantity, quality and diversity of backchanneling production.The experimental group, which did the choral repetition, generally produced a larger quantity of backchannel tokens with the exception of one anomalous point.The quality of backchannels was evaluated by looking at production across four targeted functional categories with the experimental group showing minimal to insignificant gains.The variety of back channels showed a clearly larger range of types for the control group.