A Study On Interactive Error Correction Of Vocational College Students’ English Compositions

Writing, as a skill for language output, plays a vital role in English teaching andtests. However, most vocational college students (VCS) of the non-English major arenot fond of English writing. Errors are inevitable in the process of English writing.Therefore, the error correction strategy (ECS) is so important that it directly affectsthe improvement of students’ writing ability.In China’s current educational context, the teacher still plays a dominant role inthe traditional error correction (EC) model, in which students’ writing is a passive andautomatic process of simple input and output. According to previous researches, ECScan be classified into teacher-correction, self-correction, peer-correction, andgroup-correction. Based on the theory of social constructivism which containsinteraction and cooperative learning as well as the theory of communicative approach,this study attempts to make an empirical research on the interactive error correctionstrategy (IECS), and proposes to address the following three research questions:1) Does IECS influence students’ overall quality of English writing?2) Does IECS help to strengthen students’ autonomous learning in Englishwriting?3) Does IECS help to promote students’ interests and motivation in EC ofEnglish writing?To answer the three questions, the researcher conducted an experiment oninteractive error correction (IEC) learning in Wu Han Polytechnics, which lasted fortwelve weeks. The subjects were two classes of Grade2010at the similar Englishlevel, majoring in Mechatronics. The researcher taught the two classes English. Class5of50students were chosen as the experimental group (EG) for IEC learning, whilethe other class (51students) was the control group (CG), which was taught throughthe traditional teacher-centered error correction pattern. Two tools were selected toinvestigate the experimental results: classroom experiment and questionnaire. Besides,the statistical analysis software SPSS17.0was used for statistical analyses. Theresearch has found out that EG significantly improved their self-revising ability,writing accuracy and writing performance under the influence of IECS. Thedifferences of self-revising ability and writing performance between the EG and the CG have reached the significant level, however, the difference of writing fluencybetween the pre-test and the post-test in EG and CG has not reached a significant level.Moreover, it was concluded from the questionnaire that most students thought IECShad promoted their interests and motivation in the EC of English writing.In a word, IECS can enhance the teaching and learning of VCS English writingefficiently in class. Nevertheless, as some students are rather poor in Englishfoundation and lacking of learning autonomy, they feel reluctant to participate in theinteractive learning. Hence, the actual teaching condition and particularity of theindividuals will be taken into account in the future teaching. It is expected that theresearch will be helpful in providing some implications for the future teaching ofEnglish writing and can serve as a reference for further researches on the ECS.