A typology of metalinguistic feedback

Metalinguistic feedback has attracted considerable attention from researchers investigating the effectiveness of different feedback types, but experimental studies have yielded inconclusive results. One possible but little discussed reason is that, while mainly treated as a uniform category, metalinguistic information provided in such studies has been operationalized inconsistently. Authentic metalinguistic feedback provided by teachers has also proved to vary considerably in nature, demonstrating a need for a more fine-grained analytical framework. The article presents a suggestion for a typology of metalinguistic feedback, based on naturalistic data from teachers of L2 English and L3 Spanish. The typology considers the informativeness of feedback and how it is formulated, and it consists of two dimensions: the tools and the metalanguage teachers employ when providing metalinguistic information. The hope is that it can be of use both in future research on this specific feedback type and as a “toolbox” for practitioners.