Error Treatment In Chinese EFL Classrooms

Errors, as a significant indicator of how the language learners have grasped the target language, have attracted more and more attention of teachers and researchers in the field of second language acquisition. It is suggested that the learners are able to move forward in the target language continuum by making hypotheses, testing them and confirming or reformulating them. To explore how linguistic errors in classroom interaction were treated in EFL classrooms and find out the desirable way of error correction for college students, the author conducted a study that included as subjects eighty teachers from twelve universities and three hundred and fifty-two freshmen from five higher learning institutes. Data were collected by the administration of questionnaires and interviews. The results were as follows:Major findings of this study can be summarized as follows:1. Both EM teacher group and NEM teacher group did not over-react to students'errors. The type of errors they treated most frequently was expression errors. Next were grammatical errors and pronunciation errors. The techniques employed most by teachers were recast and elicitation. Teachers were not critical upon the occurrence of students'errors on the whole. Some teachers made use of non-verbal means in providing negative feedback. Most of the teachers corrected student errors after the students finished with their expressions. Teachers'corrective behavior differed when students were engaged in teacher-centered activities and pair/group work.2. The difference between EM teacher group and NEM teacher group mainly consisted in: 1) EM teachers corrected their students less often than NEM teachers. 2) EM teachers treated expression errors more than NEM teachers, while NEM teachers treated grammatical and pronunciation errors more. 3) EM teachers used clarification request more than NEM teachers, while NEM teachers used explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback more.3. A majority of teachers did take individual differences into account in providing...