Edited by Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios
[Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 5] 2023
► pp. 315–336
Providing written corrective feedback in computer-mediated communication (CMC) environments has increasingly attracted the interest of both researchers and practitioners. In this chapter we reflect on our study, Shintani & Aubrey (2016), which examined the comparative effects of synchronous and asynchronous written corrective feedback on the accurate production of target grammatical features in a guided writing task. The methodological challenges we experienced related to (a) operationalizing synchronous and asynchronous written corrective feedback; (b) designing treatment materials and procedures; (c) testing; and (d) analyzing the data. In each decision, we tried to find a balance between experimental control and ecological validity. This chapter not only provides a window into how we overcame these challenges but also gives suggestions for research methodologies that can be used in future studies to explore the provision of written corrective feedback through online technologies.