Study On Issues Relating To Error Correction In An Oral Class Of Teaching Mandarin As A Foreign Language.

The method of error correction in language oral class, and the attitude of students toward such correction has received much attention overseas. However, this topic has yet to receive full study in the field of teaching mandarin as a second language. Learning a second language is a long and complicated process; to a foreign student,"Hanyu"has left the impression of being difficult to learn, despite years of education received in China. Many mistakes are generated due to the tonal component and the sentence structure of Hanyu. Naturally, mistakes are to be expected and even allowed, but as teachers, how we deal with the mistakes warrant further considerations. Specifically, during an oral class, should a teacher correct a student's mistake directly? How do we lower the rate of error? These questions are crucial to the performance of a teacher in a class. An oral class is a skill specific training class, its purpose to train the students to communicate fluently, yet the issue of error correction needs to be addressed. There are different schools of thoughts with regards to this issue: the communicative approach is of the view that error that doesn't affect accurate communication should not be corrected, yet other approaches insist on making correction at every opportunities.To investigate this issue, this paper has conducted a survey among 80 students and 50 teachers of teaching mandarin as a foreign language. Basing on the information received through the survey and combining relative studies, this paper discuss the issues relating to error correction in the field of teaching mandarin as a foreign language, including whether to correct, when to correct, how to correct and who to correct.