The Effects Of Teacher's Error Treatment On Learners' Uptake In The EFL Classroom Setting

Teacher's error treatment has been the focus for some time both in SLA and cognition fields. However, even up till now, it seems that no definite conclusion has been made about what treatment is the most effective in dealing with the students' errors. On the other hand, though theoretically some researchers have noticed the importance of investigating the potential long-term effects of error treatment on language learning, few empirical studies have been carried out to check the students' actual understanding of the items in question after the teacher's error treatment in delayed language applications. Owing to these, the author considers it pedagogically valuable to study the potential effects of teacher's error treatment on students' uptake over time.The focus of this study is on the potential effects of teacher's error treatment on learners' uptake over time in the classroom setting. The present study is a natural longitude classroom observation of about three months on 23 English majors in Grade One in the English department of South China Normal University. The author acts as both the teacher and researcher. Direct and indirect error treatments are both applied in this research. All together 157 error treatment sequences out of 60 periods of lessons have been recorded and analyzed. Then three rounds of error treatment are carried out respectively in three different periods of time to check the potential effects of error treatment on learners' uptake in the classroom setting. The first round focuses on the association between the teacher's immediate error treatment and the students' immediate uptake; the second and third rounds focus on the association between the teacher's follow-up checking and the students' delayed uptake.Findings in the present study suggest that teacher's error treatment seems to have both immediate and long-term effects on the students' uptake. On the whole, the students seem to have benefited from the error treatment in all the three rounds. Notably more successful uptake occur in the second and third rounds and the students seem to greatly reduce the amounts of errors in pragmatics, semantics, lexical items and morphosyntax, though, comparatively speaking, the levels of immediate and delayed uptake in phonological errors are not as high as in other error types. As the ways of error treatment are concerned, results of the present study suggest that direct error treatments seem to result in more uptake and successful uptake than the indirect ones. Among the seven specific ways of error treatment, the most frequently used way is provide, the second, recast, while elicitation, the third. It is provide that seems to be more likely to lead tomost successful uptake in the present study.Findings of the present study provide some pedagogical implications for EFL teaching: first, the teacher's error treatment seems to play facilitative and stimulative roles in learners' language learning over time in the EFL classroom setting. Findings of the present study seem to suggest what language teachers should do is more than correct the errors at the moment they are made, but should carry on checking the erroneous items in the follow-up class activities so that students can be helped consolidate and apply the items in question better in the developmental learning. The second implication is that it may be more desirable for language teachers to integrate formal instructions into the communicative tasks in the EFL classroom setting.