A Study On Error Correction For Non-English Majors In Oral English Class In Independent Colleges

This thesis mainly explores the present situation and practice of error correction in oral English class for non-English majors in Independent Colleges, and also teachers'and students'views on error correction in oral English classroom. This study focuses on the teachers'conceptions and practice on in-class oral error correction, and students' awareness and ability of self-correction in oral English classroom as well and it is aimed at offering some constructive pedagogical suggestions for the in-class oral error correction. The research subjects are ten oral English teachers and one hundred and two students in Nanfang Translators'College of SISU. And three instruments are adopted in this study: classroom observation, interview and questionnaire survey. Five research questions are:(1) What is the present situation of in-class oral English error correction? (2) What are teachers'conceptions on in-class oral English error correction? (3) What are the teachers' preferences of error correction strategies? (4) What are students'views and expectations on error correction in oral English class? (5) Do students have awareness and ability of self-correction?The major findings of this study are summarized as followings:1. The present oral English class is of teacher-centered class pattern, and the purpose of oral English is to finish class arrangement or task, and teachers do a lot of work in class and they take most of responsibility of in-class error correction; while most students perform passively in class and they depend on their teachers to do error correction. This situation may affect the effectiveness of in-class oral error correction. Thus, the author suggests that teachers should create a relaxed and harmonious classroom atmosphere and pay attention to class interaction between teachers and students and encourage students to speak more in class, and the purpose of giving oral English class should be providing students more chances to practice English and help students improve their oral English. And this class pattern can provide condition for effective in-class oral error correction.2. In teachers'conceptions, elicitation and postponed correction are better error correction strategies than other types of strategies, however in actual classroom, teachers consider little about these types of correction strategy and they prefer recasts and prompt correction most. The reason is that they think this way is more effective under the condition of limited class hour. The author suggests that in order to improve the effectiveness of error correction, teachers should reconstruct their conceptions on error correction, and they should adopt different correction strategies according to different situations.3. In students'conceptions, doing error correction is teachers'job, and they expect teachers to take all the responsibility of doing in-class error correction. Most students'self-correction awareness and ability are weak. The author suggests that teachers should help students enhance their self-correction awareness and ability, and let them share the responsibility of doing error correction with their teachers in order to achieve the effectiveness of in-class error correction.