A Comparison Of The Ways Of Error Correction In College English Classroom Instruction

After undergoing the stages such as Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage Analysis, the attitudes towards error correction have evolved from the strict avoidance of errors and hence quick and direct error correction before the 1960s, to the condemnation of error correction as harmful and unnecessary in the late 1960s, and to a more critical view of the need and value of error correction in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s. Nowadays more people would like to view making error as a strategy, evidence of learner internal processing, and errors are an important part of the learning process and quite informative and useful both for the learner and the teacher, and think the fundamental way to correct errors could teach students to learn more effectively and efficiently. Meanwhile, comparing with the naturalistic second language acquisition, the classroom instruction is a special designed learning circumstance and an activity which is planned seriously and organized in a systematic way. The character of classroom instruction decides the learners could improve their acquired efficiency by designing and changing the teaching method. Accordingly, the present study sets about probing the error treatment in EFL classroom setting, and compare the effects of the different error treatment on the different level's learners, thus finding a comparatively effective way of error treatment which may contribute to improving the teaching quality.The research is conducted among teachers and students in Qinghai University exclusively. With classroom observation, test, and questionnaire, the researcher attempts to find out: (1) If the students at different levels make the same errors? (2) If the different ways of error treatment will produce the same effect on the students at same level? (3) What is the students' attitude and expectation of how teacher should treat their errors in class?As a result of it, we could draw the following conclusion:(1) The errors in the study could be categorized into six types, i.e. phonological error, morphosyntactic error, lexical error, semantic error, pragmatic error, content error, and the main types of error that students at different levels make are similar, but the proportions of these errors are different. Corresponding with it, the proportions of the teacher's error treatment are different.(2) The contrast between the direct error treatment and the indirect error treatment in the same level class indicates that the influence of these two different ways of error treatment on the students at same level is different. For the students at high level, the effect of indirect error treatment is superior to direct error treatment, whereas for the students at low level, the effect of direct error treatment is superior to indirect error treatment evidently. This reflects that the different ways of error treatment will produce the different effect on the students at same level.(3) The students at different level all hold positive attitude towards error treatment, in particular the teacher's error treatment in class. They are thinking highly of the effect of the teacher's error treatment and depending much on it to improve their English proficiency. The difference between them is that the students at high level would like to choose the way of self-correction with the help of teacher and hope the teacher could combine the direct error treatment with indirect error treatment to correct their errors in class, while the students at low level depend much on teacher to correct their errors with the way of direct error treatment.This thesis is composed of six parts. Part one shows the orientation, purpose and significance of the study. Part two provides the literature review about the thesis. Part three addresses some relevant theories and models in SLA that are relevant to the present study over the past two decades. Part four describes the research conducted in this study. Part five is about data collection and analyses. Part six presents the findings of the study and its implications for teaching. Limitations of the present study are also provided.