Teacher's Corrective Feedback And Learner Uptake: A Case Study Of English-Major EFL Classroom

Since 1980s, there have been plenty of studies about classroom as language learning environment in the research field of second language acquisition (SLA). Most of those studies linked with the verbal interactions between the teacher and the students. Among the various kinds of interactions, teacher feedback lies at the core in the field of second language classroom research. So it has been attracting much attention from foreign as well as domestic researchers. The present study, inspired by Lyster & Ranta (1997) and Lyster (1998a), attempts to describe the patterns of corrective feedback, following different types of errors, and to analyze its relationship to learner uptake. Three research questions are addressed: 1) What type of error made by L2 learners attracts most attention from teacher? Alternatively, which type initiates more corrective feedback? 2) What is the distribution of different types of corrective feedback, i.e. what type of corrective feedback follows different learner errors? 3) What is the distribution of learner uptake following different types of corrective feedback?The data are derived from note-taking of observation of two sophomore English-majored comprehensive English classes at Anhui Normal University, with 17 lessons of 850 minutes. After analysis and discussion, the major findings are presented as follows:1. Lexical and grammatical errors are the more frequent ones committed by learners in the observed classrooms, but lexical errors receive much more corrective feedback than other types of errors.2. Teachers would like to recast phonological errors but prefer to negotiate lexical and grammatical errors.3. Phonological repairs tend to follow recasts, whereas lexical and grammatical errors tend to follow negotiation of form.4. Negotiation of form tend to successfully invite immediate repairs, whereas recasts are less effective in leading to repairs, often resulting in topic-continuation initiated by the teacher or students, i.e. zero-uptake.Based on the findings, some implications can be drawn for the classroom applications:1. The teacher ought to conduct more activities in which the teacher and students may have more communications with each other, and students get more opportunities to practice the target language and thus have more chances to let the teacher inform them of the gap between the target language and their problematic output.2. Teachers should not only focus their attention on lexical and grammatical development regardless of students' pronunciation in that pronunciation is one of the basic skills for English majors. As English majors in a normal university, the teaching career after graduation is the priority choice for most students. Without a standard pronunciation, they cannot become qualified teachers.3. Teachers can use the negotiation of form to encourage students' self- or peer-repairs, because this type of corrective feedback can make students, either the one committing an error or the others, notice that there are some errors in the students' performance that need modification. Besides, the English majors are capable of self-correction if they are given proper feedback moves, sufficient time and if their awareness is aroused.4. Teachers should leave more space to students to repair the errors, rather than continue the topic. Although this way may take some time, it is good for the students to develop their interlanguage.