Corrective Feedback In College English Classrooms

The study of corrective feedback in classrooms has been a hot point in the field of SLA in the recent decades. There is a widely acknowledged point that conective feedback would facilitate the development of the learners' L2 competence by providing them opportunities to notice the gap existing between their current competence and the target language and to repair their hypotheses about the target language. Various studies conducted by western researchers have proved the positive effects of corrective feedback on improving the learners' language competence. But there is a lack in empirical studies on the effects of classroom corrective behaviors in China. In view of this shortcoming, the purpose of the present study is to describe the conective behaviors in Chinese college English classrooms and address the effects of corrective feedback on students' uptake as well as the factors affecting the effectiveness of corrective feedback. Data were collected by three means: classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews.The major findings of the present study are briefly summarized as follows:1. Teachers and students both have positive attitudes towards corrective feedback. They agree on the necessity of error correction. But as for when to correct, what to correct, how to correct and who to correct, they hold different views. Teachers intend to provide students with more opportunities of producing output and correcting errors by themselves while students have a low awareness of self-repair.2. In teaching practice, teachers employ various ways to provide corrective feedback. As is observed recast is the teachers' favorite but it leads to the least students' uptake. Negotiation of form, which is less than recast, has great advantages in enhancing students' "output and repairs of the errors. Teachers avoid pointing out student errors directly, though such explicit correction helps to improve accuracy of students' L2.3. Basically, the effects of corrective feedback are affected by teachers' and students' conception about corrective feedback. In real classrooms, the focus of the lesson and students' current language competence, along with the time availability, are taken seriously by teachers when deciding the feedback types. Students' uptakes are influenced by various factors, such as the timing of correction the length of correction, the error types to be corrected, the persons who does correction and the feedback types.In general, the results of the present study can prove the positive effects of corrective feedback on second language learning, at least in short term and give a hint on how to improve its effectiveness in classroom.