A Comparative Study Of Corrective Feedback Discourse Between Novice Teachers And Expert Teachers In Junior High School English Class

“Corrective Feedback refers to teachers’ prompts to the learners when they use incorrect target language”(Lightbown & Spada,1999:171).It helps learners clearly understand their learning situation and stimulate learners’ learning motivation.However,for various reasons,novice teachers and expert teachers tend to use different corrective feedback discourse(henceforth,CFD).On many occasions,novice teachers can not meet the psychological and learning needs of the students at different levels for their unsatisfactory corrective feedback strategies.As a result,the teacher-student interactions and teaching quality has been influenced to a certain extent.In view of this,this study takes as the research subject four novice teachers and four expert teachers from two schools at different levels.By building four closed corpora,and making a comparative study of their corrective feedback discourse,the present researcher has tried specifying their similarities and differences and exploring the main reasons hidden behind,so as to help novice teachers improve their corrective feedback strategies.The aim of this study has been to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences of CFD between the novice and expert teachers?(2)What are the reasons for the similarities and differences of corrective feedback strategies between novice teachers and expert teachers?Major findings are as follows:(1)In schools of the same level,both novice teachers and expert teachers prefer to correct errors immediately their students answer the questions inaccurately or incorrectly.Compared with expert teachers,novice teachers tend to provide corrective feedback immediately after students make mistakes.Both novice and expert teachers resort to teacher correction,but expert teachers prefer to use peer error correction and self error correction.(2)In junior high schools of different levels,English teachers seldom use the corrective feedback of “asking for clarification”.Instead,they often take advantage of“recasting” and “induction” to give corrective feedback.Among these corrective feedback strategies,“repeated error correction” is more frequently used by expert teachers than novice teachers.“Error correction after students answer questions and “teacher correction”are the two most popular corrective feedback strategies.In addition,expert teachers in high-level schools seem to have performed better in error correction feedback than those in ordinary schools.(3)The proportion of implicit corrective feedback is much larger than that of explicit corrective feedback.Expert teachers use more and better corrective feedback strategies.Novice teachers use explicit corrective feedback more frequently,while expert teachers use implicit error correction more frequently.In addition,novice teachers often use explicit error correction and metalanguage feedback,while expert teachers often use repeated error correction and explicit error correction.Generally speaking,both expert teachers and novice teachers prefer to use the implicit corrective feedback strategies,“recasting” and“inducing”.(4)The reasons for the similarities are mainly related to novice teachers’ pre-service training,in-service training,and their self-improvement while the reasons for the differences are mainly related to their teaching experience,teaching wisdom,teaching pressure,the concept of corrective feedback,and the viewpoint of students.Based on the above findings and the results of interviews,this study puts forward some targeted teaching suggestions.(1)Novice teachers should actively learn from expert teachers,optimize teachers’ talk,respect students,strengthen the significance of implicit corrective feedback,increase the frequency of peer correction,and use “recasting” more significantly.(2)Expert teachers should presuppose and reflect the CFD,pay attention to the differences of students,use different CFD strategies according to different language forms,and attach importance to the emotional needs and preferences of their students.