Research Digest
Using Uptake Sheets as a
Supplementary Data Collection Tool inClassroom ResearchMartin Hawkes
The University of Shiga Prefecture
Uptake sheets are a kind of introspective data collection tool by which learners make anote of any language forms they notice or pay attention to. First described by Allwright(1984), they have mostly been employed as a supplementary instrument in classroom
research investigating noticing and form-focused instruction. While they share some of the
weaknesses of other introspective methods, such as the risk of respondents over-reporting
forms which they feel to be the target of the lesson, uptake sheets are easy to create andadminister to relatively large numbers of learners. This paper describes how uptake sheets
were utilized by the author as part of a classroom investigation conducted into the impact of
explicit instruction on learner orientation during communicative tasks. Uptake sheets wereused as a triangulating data source to try to understand what language forms learners focusedon during the lesson. This paper concludes by recommending the use of uptake sheets as aneasily administered supplementary research tool for a variety of classroom studies.
「Uptakesheets」は学習者が気づき、注意を払った言語形式を自身で書き留める

一種の内省的データ収集ツールである。1984年にAllwrightが提唱し、主に気づきと言語形式を重視する指導を調査する教室研究において補足的道具として使用されてきた。授業のねらいであると思われる言語形式を学習者が過大報告するな
ど、他の内省的メソッドに見られる弱点もあるが、「Uptake sheets」は作成が容易で比較的多数の学習者に適用できる。本論文では、明示的指導がコミュニケーション
タスク実行中の学習者の態度に及ぼす影響を探る教室研究の一環として、筆者が「Uptake sheets」をどのように活用したかを説明する。授業中に学習者が着目した言語形式を理解するために、「Uptake sheets」は三角測量的なデータソースとして使用された。様々な教室研究に容易に適用できる補足研究ツールとして「Uptake
sheets」の使用は推奨される。

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What Are Uptake Sheets?

Uptake sheets are an introspective data collection tool which have been usedin both classroom and experimental research. They have been purposed to findout what language forms learners notice or what they feel they have learned. The
premise of uptake sheets is very simple: learners are asked to make a note of any
new forms, or new aspects of partially acquired forms, that occur during a lesson.
Although the use of uptake sheets is not especially widespread, several studies
have utilized them over the years.
In this paper, I describe the use of uptake sheets by starting with a review of
how they have been used in previous research. Next, I explain the advantages andlimitations of their use as a classroom research tool before providing an exampleof how I have used them myself to add an element of triangulation for my own
investigation into tasks and learner orientation. Finally, I offer some suggestions
for those who wish to try using uptake sheets for classroom-based research.

Previous Studies Using Uptake Sheets

Allwright (1984) proposed the idea of uptake; that is, the linguistic items thatlearners consider themselves to have learned from the various stages of a language
lesson. (Note that this is somewhat different to the more common construct of
uptake proposed by Lyster and Ranta, 1997, in which it is considered to be thereactions and responses learners make following corrective feedback.) Allwrightdevised a simple procedure where, at the end of a lesson, learners would makewritten reports of what items (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation) they noticed
in the class. Report forms similar to Allwright’s were later used in classroom
research to investigate learners’ perceptions of what they had learned in class andthe source of this learning. For example, Jones (1992) and Palmeira (1995) bothfound that the most reported items were those that the teacher had supplied
during the lesson. Conversely, Slimani (1992) found that learners tended toreport items that their classmates, rather than the teacher, had supplied. In theseearly studies, this data collection tool was referred to as simply reports or learner
reports, but the term uptake sheets has been used in more recent literature (Mackey& Gass, 2015).
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Mackey, McDonough, Fujii, and Tatsumi (2001) looked at the relative
effectiveness of different uptake sheet formats to elicit useful data. The mostsuccessful format was a language-focused report (Figure 1), which requiredlearners to list items they noticed from four categories (pronunciation,
vocabulary, grammar, and case study/business) and note the input source foreach item. Mackey et al. (2001) concluded that such language-focused uptake
sheets are a convenient method of gathering information about what learners
notice in second language classrooms, and the findings from this study have been
influential in that most subsequent studies using uptake sheets have been basedon the format that they recommended.
Over the past decade or so, uptake sheets seem to have been most commonly
utilized as a supplementary data collection tool in classroom investigations ofnoticing (Schmidt, 1990) and form-focused instruction. For example, uptake
sheets have been used to investigate noticing in response to interactional
feedback from both teachers and fellow learners (Mackey, 2006; Fuji & Mackey,2009); to show that teacher-initiated, rather than learner-initiated, form-focused
episodes led to a higher incidence of uptake (Gholami & Bassirian, 2011); toassess the efficacy of different types of recasts during task interaction (Al-Surmi,2012); and to investigate the effectiveness of focus-on-form interventions(Ghaedrahmat, Mohammadnia, & Gholami, 2019; Pouresmaeil & Gholami,2019). In addition, uptake sheet data were used to reveal a disparity between ateacher’s linguistic aims for a class and the learners’ subsequent uptake (Nabei,2013).

Figure 1. The uptake sheet found to be most effective for gathering data (Mackey et al., 2001)
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Researchers have several options available to them when using uptake sheets.
They can be used by themselves to collect both quantitative and qualitative
data (Mackey & Bryfonski, 2018), but most researchers have used them ina supplementary role together with other data sources such as recordings ofclassroom interaction and stimulated recall protocols. There has been divergencein previous studies when deciding whether to distribute uptake sheets at the
beginning of the lesson and ask learners to record forms in real-time or to wait
until the end of the class and ask learners to recall the significant language points
they remember. Mackey (2017) suggested that uptake sheets be used in real-time
during class activities and not left until the end of class, which Mackey claimed
could impact validity as learners forget what they noticed. However, it could beargued that any forms reported at the end of class may reflect better the forms
which were noticed and retained. Table 1 summarizes which options the recent
empirical studies have taken.

Benefits and Limitations of Uptake Sheets

As previous studies have demonstrated, uptake sheets are a flexible data collection
tool that can be utilized in a variety of classroom investigations, often in a
supplementary role for triangulation, when the researcher wants to understandlearners’ perceptions of their own learning during different phases of a lesson.
There is also the intriguing possibility that they could be used as a pedagogicaltool to enhance noticing and augment learning. Using Mackey et al.‘s (2001)
model as a template, they are simple to create and adapt; they are also easy toadminister, collect, and analyse, and are of little burden to participants comparedto alternative methods such as simulated recall protocols or interviews.
Uptake sheets likely share the same problems as other introspective methods;
namely, that of questionable reliability and internal validity (Nunan & Bailey,2009). With any self-reported data, a threat to reliability exists because learners
might recall different items if the same procedures are repeated. However, aproblem with internal validity could be considered to be more serious than thatof reliability, as it is difficult to know whether learners are telling the truth when
they make reports (Nunan & Bailey, 2009).
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Table 1
A Summary of How Recent Studies Using Uptake Sheets Have Been Designed
Study

Other research methods

Real-time or end of class?

Al Surmi (2012)• Grammatical judgement
tests

real-time + end of class

Fujii and Mackey (2009)• Stimulated recall

end of class

Ghaedrahmat et al. (2019)• Audio recordings ofinteraction

real-time

Gholami and Bassirian (2011)• Audio recordings ofinteraction• Observation field notes

real-time

Mackey (2006)• Audio recordings ofinteraction• Stimulated recall• Focused L1 questions• Questionnaires

real-time

Nabei (2013)• Audio recordings ofinteraction

end of class

Pouresmaeil and Gholami (2019)• Audio recordings ofinteraction

real-time

In the empirical studies using uptake sheets described above, other
weaknesses have been reported. One of these was that participants wrote items
they considered to be the target forms for that lesson while ignoring others
that they may indeed have noticed and processed on some level (Gholami &Bassirian, 2011; Palmeira, 1995). Another concern is that of over-reporting:
Pouresmaeil and Gholami (2019) suggested that the very existence of the uptake
sheets could make learners particularly sensitive to noticing (an archetypal
manifestation of Labov’s, 1972, observer’s paradox), leading to a kind of uptake
inflation, where an unexpectedly large number of items are reported. Although
they felt this negatively impacted the validity of the instrument for their research
purposes, Pouresmaeil and Gholami argued that this could bring benefits to64

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language classes that are trying to promote noticing and direct learner attention
towards form. However, both these potential shortcomings can be alleviated byletting students become accustomed to using uptake sheets in lessons prior todata collection sessions, exactly the approach taken in Mackey (2006).
As with any research method, uptake sheets have their own specificdrawbacks. It is perhaps for these reasons that introspective methods such as
uptake sheets have often been considered more of a supplementary tool tosupport primary data collection methods (Harklau, 2011).

Using Uptake Sheets to Investigate Learner
Orientation in TBLT

In this section, I will describe how uptake sheets helped me in my own
investigation (Hawkes, 2018) looking at the impact of explicit instruction(EI) on task interaction. It has been strongly argued in the task-based language
teaching (TBLT) literature that any teaching of forms before a task will direct
the learners’ orientation away from meaning and lead them to simply regurgitate
the pre-taught structures (Willis & Willis, 2007). This would run counter to thekind of meaning-focused interaction that is a core principle of TBLT.
To investigate these claims, I qualitatively analysed audio recordings ofinteraction for two separate tasks from three groups of learners in intact classes(Figure 2). The Pre-task EI group received instruction of pre-determined target
forms before the task and the Post-task EI group immediately after. The No-EI
group did not receive instruction.
The qualitative analysis of the task interaction data showed that pre-teaching
did indeed appear to impact learner orientation: most learners went to someeffort to reproduce the target forms, often to the detriment of fluency and theflow of the task. However, these strongly form-focused episodes were transient,
not seen in all learners’ interactions, and there remained extensive periods of task
interaction where learners appeared to orient towards the exchange of meaning
and task completion.
These findings were based on the analysis of transcriptions of the task
interaction. To look at the issue from a different angle, I had hoped to find some65

HawkesFigure 2. The research design.
learners to participate in stimulated recall protocols to gain their perspectives
about the language choices they made. Unfortunately, although I scheduledsome sessions, none of the participants were able to volunteer their time outsideof class. This led me to look for an alternative supplementary research instrument
to provide an element of triangulation that could easily be administered duringclass time. I realised that uptake sheets could be the tool to help me understandwhat language forms learners felt they had paid attention to during the lesson.
I used an uptake sheet based on the one recommended by Mackey et al. (2001)(Figure 1) and asked learners to fill them out during the final ten minutes of thedata collection sessions. I made the decision to have learners complete them atthe end of class, as opposed to in real-time during the class activities, as I did notwant the learners to be distracted from the task performance but instead later
look back and reflect on the forms that had made a lasting impression on them.
I hypothesized that if pre-teaching really did direct learner attention
towards form, this would be reflected in the items that the Pre-task EI groupreported. I expected them to report items that were the target forms taught
during the EI. The Post-task EI group’s interaction data had painted a pictureof meaning-oriented learners using whatever forms they had in their existing
linguistic repertoire. However, I was curious about the way the post-task EI
would influence the uptake sheet data. After all, the Post-task EI group received
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instruction just before the uptake sheets were filled in. Surely, learners would
write down those forms which had just been introduced by the teacher? And for
the No-EI group, without being explicitly taught any target forms, what would
they report noticing?
The uptake sheet data supported the main recorded interaction data in threemain ways. First, the Pre-task EI group tended to report more EI-related forms
than their peers in the Post-task EI group (and the No-EI group, but this wasto be expected as they had not yet received the EI). This was despite the factthat the Post-task EI learners had finished the EI moments before filling out theuptake sheets, suggesting that the Post-task EI learners considered many of theforms they noticed during the task interaction to be of more importance.
Second, for the type of forms reported, there seemed to be more of a focus
on grammar in the Pre-task EI group. These were invariably forms taken from the
EI, again indicating an orientation to form. Conversely, the Post-task EI learners
tended to focus more on the vocabulary items necessary for meaning exchange
and task completion. Some of these were picked up during the pre-task activities
and others from the main task interaction.
Third, regarding the source of noticed forms, the Pre-task EI group tended toreport materials, meaning the EI handouts, as being the source of their noticing.
They attributed far fewer forms to their peers than the Post-task EI group, whoreported more forms from the pre-task stages or ones picked up from theirinterlocutors during the tasks. This was especially the case for the No-EI group,
who overwhelmingly reported their peers as being the source of noticed forms.
This noticing of mostly vocabulary items seemingly occurred naturally as partof the task interaction. As this brief summary shows, the uptake sheet data wereable to provide support for some of the conclusions made from the interaction
data, thereby strengthening the validity of the study.

Recommendations for Using Uptake Sheets

Uptake sheets can be a useful tool for teacher researchers in a wide variety ofclassroom investigations. Using Mackey et al.‘s (2001) design, they are easily
created, distributed, collected, and analysed, and can reveal what forms students
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Hawkesare really internalizing from EI, learning materials, corrective feedback, andtheir peers. They can help reveal learner orientations and determine if they arecongruent with the teacher’s goals and intentions. They could also be useful instudies of more implicit form-focused instruction, such as input enhancement(Loewen, 2015). Finally, in actual pedagogy, teachers may also find uptake sheetsa useful way to direct learners’ attention towards form by enhancing noticing.
If, as Pouresmaeil and Gholami (2019) suggested, these sheets cause uptake
inflation, they could be a means of boosting noticing and directing attention toform during largely meaning-focused instruction.

Conclusion

This paper has proposed uptake sheets to be a convenient tool for collecting
supplementary data in classroom research. While their limitations need tobe acknowledged, they are an alternative introspective method in situations
where, as I experienced first-hand, stimulated recall protocols may be difficult
to conduct due to time or volunteer number constraints. For studies with arelatively large number of students in intact classes, uptake sheets are easily
created, administered, and collected, with relatively little inconvenience to theparticipants or interruption to the class flow (especially if done at the end ofclass). Several studies over the years have been able to look at data obtained fromaudio recordings from a different angle. This was also the approach I took in mystudy, and I found uptake sheets provided valuable data that corroborated themain findings, strengthened the validity of the study, and allowed me to draw
conclusions regarding the impact of explicit instruction on learner orientation intasks. It is hoped that the reader may wish to try out uptake sheets as an innovationin their classes for either pedagogical or research-oriented goals.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Joe Falout for his helpful suggestions and guidance
throughout the revision process.

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Author bio

Martin Hawkes has been teaching in Japan since 2003 and is an associate professor
at The University of Shiga Prefecture. He holds an MSc in TESOL and a PhD in
Applied Linguistics, both from Aston University. His interests include task-based70

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language teaching and English as a Medium of Instruction. martin_hawkes@
hotmail.com
Received: July 15, 2020
Accepted: January 23, 2021

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