An Analysis Of The Effect Of Peer Corrective Feedback On Learner's Pronunciation Learning In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Nowadays, most of the error correction in teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) area is related to teacher correction, with little concern to peer correction which is also an important activity in the classroom. Pronunciation is an essential and difficult aspect in learning Chinese, which draws much attention from the researchers. On the basis of empirical study, this thesis explores the effect of peer corrective feedback on learner's pronunciation learning. To be more specific, this study aims to answer the following three questions:(1) Whether peer corrective feedback can facilitate the students'pronunciation?(2) What is the students'attitude towards peer correction?(3) How do the students correct each other in the peer correction section? The present study, which lasted 8 weeks, was conducted in the two intact classes from International College of Zhejiang University. One intact class was the experimental class (Class-3,18-students) and the other was the control class (Class-4, 17-students). A pre-test was conducted to test whether the students of two classes were at the same level in terms of pronunciation. The result was affirmative. During the experiment, only teacher correction was adopted in the control class. On the contrary, in the experimental class, both teacher correction and peer correction were adopted. Moreover, during the experiment, the author recorded the teaching activity of the two classes in the 4th and 6th week. In the 9th week, a post-test was conducted to test the pronunciation of the two classes. Meanwhile, a questionnaire was administered among the 18 students of the experimental class. Then some of students were chosen randomly to do an interview.The study shows that the students of two classes have made impressive progress, which indicates that both corrective methods can facilitate students'pronunciation. However, the students of experimental class improved much more than those of control class, so it can be concluded that peer corrective feedback has played an important role in facilitating students'pronunciation learning. Furthermore, most students have a positive attitude towards peer correction and confirm its effectiveness. In peer correction section, students resort to giving examples, repeating and imitating, drawing pictures, explaining in English/Chinese/Spanish to correct each other.Therefore, owning to its effectiveness of improving students' pronunciation, peer correction can be applied together with teacher correction as a supplementary role, not only to relieve teacher's burden but also to boost learners' interest in learning.