Students' Affect From Error-correcting Strategies

In communication environments, the addresser's verbal behaviors have some influences on the addressee's affect. The classroom is a major communication environment (Richmond, 1987: 55). In English classroom teaching, which is in fact a communicative activity, teacher talk takes up two-thirds of the activity (Stones, 1979: 105), and has a great impact on a learner's affect. Therefore, its use should be taken into ftill consideration.This thesis, based on a survey on one aspect of the teacher talk-teachers' feedback to adolescent learners' spoken errors in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar in I-R-F move of EFL exercise classes, aims to find out teachers' feedback strategies (error-correcting strategies) and to look into the influences of these strategies on adolescent students' affect (liking and confidence). The thesis employs Grice's Cooperative Principle {CP) and Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) to analyze the properties of error-correcting strategies respectively-their observance or violation of the above two principles-with a view to revealing why different strategies influence learners' affect in different ways. The results of our study indicate that 1) strategies observing CP and PP enjoy eminent positions in learners' positive affect (liking and confidence); 2) the strategy observing CP without violating PP is neutral to learners' affect; 3) strategies violating either CP or PP are disliked by most learners and have less power to establish their confidence and they show negative influences on learners' affect. This thesis makes a suggestion that the use of error-correcting strategies should consider adolescent students' affect and makes an attempt to provide a pragmatic perspective for Ihe study of the teacher talk.This thesis consists of a body of five chapters.Chapter One sketchily expounds the theoretical basis of the thesis.Chapter Two elaborates teachers' feedback in the context of communication. Feedback is the most important element incommunication. In communication, the addresser's verbal behaviors have some impacts on the receiver's affect. The classroom is a major communication environment (Richmond, 1987: 55), and the teacher's feedback is a means of communication, so it can influence learners' affect. Chapter Three deals with the research. The first part of the research is conducted concerning the types of error-correcting strategies of middle-school English teachers by the non-participant observation method; the second part of the research aims at surveying the influences of error-correcting strategies on adolescent students' affect (liking and confidence) by the survey research.Chapter Four copes with the research results. The research onteachers' feedback in EFL exercise classes shows that there are six types oferror-correcting strategies: suggesting, praising and correcting, directcorrecting, peer correcting, tolerating, and criticizing and correcting. Theresults of the survey research on adolescent students' affect (liking andconfidence) are as follows: 1) the number of students who like thesuggesting strategy and think this strategy can make them confident bothrank highest among six strategies; concerning the praising and correctingstrategy, there are more students who have positive affect than those whohave opposite ideas; 2) the direct correcting strategy proves neutral tolearners' affect; 3) the criticizing and correcting strategy is the last one tobe liked and to make learners confident; the use of the peer correcting andthe tolerating strategy also shows their negative influences on learners'affect.Chapter Five makes a discussion of the research results by applying CP and PP to teachers' error-correcting strategies. CP proposes that in communication, the participants work at the same goal by observing four maxims. In feedback, the goal for the teacher and the student focuses on knowledge or skill grasp. When there are errors in the learner's answer, he is more curious about the right knowledge or skill that is the goal for h...