Oral Corrective Feedback:Beliefs And Practices Of University EFL Teachers

As an important part of classroom teaching,oral corrective feedback has received extensive attention in the field of second language acquisition.Existing research mostly focuses on the effectiveness of oral corrective feedback and conducts belief surveys around students’ preferences,but little attention is paid to teachers’ oral corrective feedback beliefs and practices.Among them,the limited relevant research results are mostly based on the second language or foreign language context overseas and primary or secondary school classes at home.There is little research on Chinese college English teachers’ beliefs and practices of oral corrective feedback.Based on the above research background and existing research limitations,this paper takes three university EFL teachers from an ordinary university in Tianjin as the research objects and aims to address the following research issues: 1.What do university EFL teachers believe about oral corrective feedback? 2.How do university EFL teachers provide oral corrective feedback in practice? 3.What kinds of(in)congruence exist between university EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding teachers’ oral corrective feedback? If there is any incongruence,what factors might account for it?This paper mainly adopts the qualitative research method,collects data through classroom observation and interview,and explores three university EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices in terms of such five dimensions as the necessity,timing,strategy,target,and agent of oral corrective feedback.Classroom observation data is mainly used in the analysis of teachers’ in-class oral corrective feedback behavior,the interview data is mainly used in the analysis of their oral corrective feedback beliefs.After that,two groups of data analysis are compared to explore the extent of congruence between teachers’ beliefs and practices and try to explain the possible factors behind it.The main conclusions are as follows: First,college English teachers have positive beliefs about the role of oral corrective feedback.However,for the consideration of classroom teaching efficiency and students’ willingness to express themselves,they believe that errors should be properly and selectively corrected,and are more inclined to delayed feedback for pronunciation,grammar,and lexical errors through reformulations from the teacher as the lead.Second,in practical teaching,the feedback frequency of the three teachers is medium to high,and the teacher-led delayed feedback is mostly adopted.There is more corrective feedback for discourse,pronunciation,and lexical errors,and the feedback strategies are mainly recasts,explicit correction,and elaboration.Thirdly,there is a complex relationship between the beliefs and practices of the three teachers on oral corrective feedback.Among them,there is a high consistency in feedback timing and agent,but teachers usually underestimate their feedback frequency,and there are also differences in feedback targets and strategies.This research enriches and extends the existing studies of oral corrective feedback,exploring the beliefs and practices about oral corrective feedback in university EFL teacher groups.For university language teachers,they may benefit from opportunities to deepen their understanding of what oral corrective feedback means and how it facilitates language acquisition and enhances their ability to reflect on the influence of teacher beliefs and environmental factors on teaching choices.From the practical point of view,teacher educators can use the results of this study to carry out effective teaching of oral corrective feedback and guide future teachers to integrate theoretical knowledge into various teaching situations reflectively.In addition,this paper identifies some topics that need more empirical research in order to give full play to the positive role of oral corrective feedback in future teaching and education.