A Study On Teachers’ Corrective Feedback Strategies In High English Classrooms

In the study of second language teaching, researchers and teachers put more emphasis on teachers’corrective feedback. Recently, many researchers studied corrective feedback from the students’perspectives. However, most of them focused on college students’requirements, and few studies explore the students in high English classrooms. Meanwhile, few studies researches the effects of teachers’corrective feedback on the students’noticing and how different types of corrective feedback strategies affect the students’noticing.To further explore the application of corrective feedback strategies in high English classrooms, the present study takes160Grade One students in three different level classes and12teachers from Xiong Yue High School as the research subjects. In the light of Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis and Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis, the study investigates the usage of teachers’corrective feedback strategies in English class, and whether teachers’ corrective feedback consider students’emotion and requirements, and how corrective feedback affects the students’noticing. Through the three instruments-classroom observation, students’questionnaire, and interviews for both students and teachers, the study collects the data and does analysis and discussion by quantitative and qualitative methods. The data analysis finds that teachers all tend to use explicit correction and recasts more in class, but the teacher in high level class prefers to use more negotiation of forms (clarification requests, metalinguistic clues, elicitation, and repetition). Teachers’corrective feedback will influence students’self-confidence and anxiety. Through comparing students’and teachers’opinions, teachers’corrective feedback may not consider students’emotion. Teacher’s views sometimes are unmatched with their practical teaching. On the aspect of students’noticing, elicitation and metalinguistic clues can attract students’attention in a large extent and guide the students to do self-correction. Although explicit correction and recasts could attract the students’ attention, they may not make students aware why they are wrong and how to correct errors successfully. Metalinguistic clues and repetition could attract students’attention but have the lowest efficiency in corrective feedback.At last, suggestions are offered to the teachers and the students in high schools. High school teachers should pay more attention on students’emotion and their requirements to teachers’corrective feedback. They could use more implicit correction or combine various corrective feedback strategies to strengthen the students’confidence and lower their anxiety, to arouse the students’noticing in a large extent. Moreover, the present study could provide meaningful reference for the future experimental studies.