An Investigation Into Oral Error Corrective Feedback In Senior High English Classrooms

Since the 1950s, from the theory of Contrast Analysis, Error Analysis, to theory of Intralanguage Analysis, researches on language learner's errors have started their long march in the field of foreign language acquisition; meanwhile, the role played by corrective feedback during language acquisition has become a highly controversial issue. Many researchers, such as Hendrickson, Chaudron, Long, etc., have made much contribution in this field. Their researches provide essential theoretical and empirical background for the deeper research on corrective feedback. Based on the framework of five questions put forward by Chaudron, this paper conducts an investigation into oral error corrective feedback in senior high English classrooms by adopting classroom observation, questionnaires and after-class interviews, involving 182 students and 32 teachers. The author aims to find the current condition of error treatment in today's senior high English classrooms, as well as the differences between teachers'and students'attitudes towards the corrective feedback in class, and finally provide the pedagogical implications for English teachers in future English class teaching.The obtained results show that in today's senior high English classrooms: 1)almost all the errors committed by students in class will be corrected; 2)oral errors which occur often in class can be categorized into phonological errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors, and pragmatic errors, and comparatively speaking, the lexical errors are corrected more often while pragmatic errors arouse less attention; 3) when facing oral errors during students'oral performance, the majority of teachers prefer to correct the oral errors after students have finished their presentation; 4)error corrective feedback type in class includes explicit correction, recast, repetition, and meta-linguistic clues, among which explicit correction is used more often by teachers; 5) oral errors in class are corrected by teachers most of the time. Moreover, teachers and students do hold different attitudes towards error corrective feedback. For example, the majority of teachers object correcting all the errors, while most of the students consider all the errors should be corrected whenever they occur in class; teachers prefer to correct the errors selectively and they think only those which often occur and impair the communication should be corrected, but many students hope most of their errors can be corrected by their teachers; many teachers don't think that it's appropriate to give too much corrective feedback because that may frustrate the students and decrease their confidence, while more than half of the students think over-correction will have no negative effect on their learning confidence.