Oral Error Feedback In The English Classroom Activities

Over the last few years, the role played by corrective feedback in language acquisition has become a highly controversial issue. Though disputed theories and research articles collide with each other, there appears to be a growing consensus among the majority of researchers and language practitioners concerning the significance of the role played by corrective feedback in the process of second language acquisition. Systematical theories on oral error feedback have been established over the past few decades. Many researchers, such as Bailey, Chaudron, Long, etc., have contributed much to this field. They bring forward the models and measures for oral error feedback. On the basis of the model proposed by Chaudron, this thesis presents findings based on a comparison of students' and teachers' attitudes towards oral error feedback involving 204 non-English major, sophomore students and 39 English teachers from Zhejiang University.The results show that students and teachers do hold different attitudes towards some internal aspects of oral error feedback. Though most students and teachers hold that learner errors should be corrected, their attitudes towards when and how to correct learner errors are significantly different. To phonological errors, students like immediate treatment best, while to lexical, grammatical and L1 errors, students like delayed treatment best. However, teachers like to use delayed treatment best to different error types. Students prefer explicit correction to different error types, but teachers provide different feedback types across different error types. Their perceptions of whether different error types should deserve the same attention are also significantly different. Students hold that lexical errors should deserve the most attention;L1 errors rank the second;grammatical errors rank the third and phonological errors rank the last. However, teachers report that they provide the most feedback to lexical errors;phonological and grammatical errors share the second and the least feedback to L1 errors. As for who should correct learner errors, students' and teachers' attitudes are not very different. To phonological, lexical and L1 errors most students and teachers think teacher-correction is the best. But to grammatical errors, most teachers think students' self-correction is the best, while most students still prefer teacher-correction.