| Classroom intercation has been centre of interest in the field of second language acquisition from 1980s. Corrective feedback, the very important move in the classroom interaction, is considered as an analytic teaching strategy that appears when the teacher identifies an error. The issues with regard to the role and contribution of corrective feedback have been the target of investigation in the field of classroom second language acquisition and pedagogy. It has been proved to provide students with opprotunities to attend to linguistic form (Long, 1996), to notice a gap between the target language input and their own interlanguage form, and then to invite more repaired uptake (Swain, 1985), accordingly, assist interlanguage development. The studies on corrective feedback and student uptake have been heatedly carried out in the field of classroom SLA abroad, while in China, researchers have mainly discussed the study from the theoretical perspectives. Few empirical classroom studies are conducted. The present study, following up the research by Lyster and Ranta (1997), and Lyster (1998a) mainly for the reason that it is a descriptive study of the types of feedback most used by teachers and the types of feedback that lead to uptake, targets at finding out the relationship among student errors, teacher corrective feedback and student uptake, and attempts to discuss the potential effects of teacher corrective feedback on EFL students'language development in the form of uptake.Two research questions are addressed:(1) What is the correlation between types of student errors and types of corrective feedback? i.e. what types of student errors initiate what types of corrective feedback?(2) What is the relationship between corrective feedback and student uptake? i.e. what types of corrective feedback elicit more student uptake? and what types of corrective feedback lead to what types of student uptake?The data of the study were derived from observation of altogether 12 intensive reading lessons of the 3 teachers with each teacher 4 lessons,which amount to 1080 minutes of recording. On the basis of data analysis, the major findings are presented as follows:(1) The data reveal that students made four types of errors. And among these, phonological errors appear the most frequent. Therefore, teachers more frequently provided corrective feedback on phonological errors, though the feedback rate following phonological errors didn't rank on the top. Teachers demostrated the lowest tolerance to unsolicited uses of L1, as the feedback rate towards this type of error ranked the highest.(2) Teacher corrective feedback types are closely related to the types of student errors. Phonological errors, unsolicited uses of L1, and grammatical errors usually led to teacher recast, whereas lexical errors were mostly followed by teacher prompts.(3) The types of teacher corrective feedback are found to be correlated to the types of student uptake. Recasts were prone to elicit phonological repairs. Prompts were inclined to lead to lexical repairs, L1 repairs and grammatical repairs.(4) In initiating uptake and repairs, prompts seemed to be the most successful type of corrective feedback, whereas recasts and explicit correction were not so effective. The latter two corrective feedback types often led to non-verbal uptake and more no uptakes.Theoretically, the present study reveals the types of uptake to different types of corrective feedback as well as the types of feedback with elicitation of better uptake rates in a typical Chinese EFL context. Pedagogically, some implications can be inferred from the findings: for instance, teachers should not excessively use recasts but adopt corrective feedback eliciting more repairs so as to avoid fossilization of errors as much as possible. However, there still exisits some limitations such as no follow– up studies to explore the long– term impact of teacher corrective feedback on students'language development which needs further research. |
