A Study Of Teachers' Corrective Feedback In College EFL Classroom

In recent years, a growing number of researchers and teachers have begun to value the role that corrective feedback plays in the second language classroom, and almost all their results and arguments favor corrective feedback in L2 learning. However, few of them explore teachers' beliefs in corrective feedback and their actual practice in EFL classroom as well as students' perspectives on and expectations for teachers' corrective feedback techniques.To address these issues the present research is thus designed, in which 30 EFL teachers and 120 non-English-major sophomores are involved and three instruments—questionnaire, classroom observation and interview are used to collect relevant data and information. The data is then analyzed with qualitative and quantitative methods.The major findings of this study can be summarized as follows:1) Teachers have strong beliefs in corrective feedback; and their beliefs affect their in-class practice to a large extent.2) There is still a gap between teachers' beliefs and their actual in-class corrective practice with regard to how errors should be corrected. Teachers believe that elicitation is the most effective type of feedback, but in class the most frequently employed type of corrective feedback by teachers is recast. 3) In class teachers can take students' affective requirements into consideration when correcting their errors.4) Although in a certain degree teachers have made efforts to meet their students' needs, they offer less corrective feedback than students expect. And students' most preferred type of corrective feedback is explicit correction instead of recast, which is used most frequently by teachers in class.Findings of the present research provide some pedagogical implication for EFL teaching: firstly, the teachers' corrective feedback plays facilitative and stimulative roles in students' language learning over time in the EFL classroom setting. Secondly, teachers should pay more attention to students' expectations and attitudes with regard to errors and corrective feedback in order to help enhance students' English learning. Thirdly, teachers should be organized to get more training on corrective feedback pedagogy to improve their teaching.