In Rod Ellis's (2008) influential typology of corrective feedback (CF) on L2 learners' writing, under "Strategies for providing CF" he lists Direct CF, Indirect CF, Metalinguistic CF, Unfocused and Focused CF, Reformulation, and Electronic Feedback. At the time, this classification of electronic feedback into its own category was no doubt justified because it had yet to become mainstream, and it led to a simpler typology.
Today, such a typology can no longer be justified. Various kinds of feedback, including those listed by Ellis, can be delivered by traditional or by electronic means and using a range of different tools. Based on the author’s experiences leading a Kakenhi project on corrective feedback, this paper surveys these options and examines the practical and theoretical implications of delivering feedback electronically. One such implication is that the disadvantages of metalinguistic CF can be partially mitigated by delivering feedback online, and a felicitous partial merging of feedback categories may occur thanks to the affordances of online tools.