10. Preemptive feedback in CALL

This study compared the effectiveness of two types of preemptive feedback in a CALL environment. As part of their regular course assignments throughout the fall 2009 semester, L2 learners of German (N = 185) performed a sentence completion task. For each individual exercise, the CALL system generated preemptive feedback based on the error profiles from 5000 users who previously used the CALL system between 2003 and 2008. Two types of preemptive feedback with varying specificity were designed to draw attention to the most common errors associated with each item. Results indicate that both types of preemptive feedback were significantly more effective than not providing any task assistance. In addition, differences with respect to proficiency levels and error types were found.