Oral Error-correction In Senior High School English Classroom:a Comparative Study Between Students’Preferences And Teachers’ Behaviors

As one of the most important parts in second language acquisition, oral error-correction in English class has been an extensive controversy since1960s. Language learning, especially foreign language learning, is mostly conducted in classroom settings; therefore, the attitudes that teachers and students hold towards error-correction deserves great attention. Since1990s, there is a growing theoretical consensus concerning the effectiveness of error-correction in improving the learner’s interlanguage and evidence from some empirical studies suggests that error-correction has a very positive effect on foreign language learning. However, few empirical studies have been conducted in Senior High School English classroom, and the comparative studies between students’preference and teachers’ actual practice are much fewer. To fill up this gap. this study makes a survey into the differences between high school students" preference and teachers’ actual practice in terms of attitudes towards oral error-correction, the types of oral error-correction and the methods of oral error-correction. The research questions to be addressed in the thesis are:1) Are there any differences between students’ attitudes and teachers’attitudes towards oral error-correction? If yes, what are the differences?2) Are there any differences between students’ preferences and teachers’ actual behaviors on the types of oral error-correction? If yes. what are the differences?3) Are there any differences between students’ preferences and teachers’ actual behaviors on the methods of oral error-correction? If yes. what are the differences?In this study, both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted. The quantitative research includes a questionnaire. The questionnaire survey is an updated and expanded version of the questionnaires developed and adopted by Lyster. R.&Ranta, L.(1997) and Hu Yuezhu (2009). The subjects participated in this research include111high school students who come from Shuren Middle School and Xinhua Middle School and34teachers who come from Shuren Middle School. Xinhua Middle School. Yangzhou Middle School, Hanjiang Middle School, Jiangwang Middle School and Yizheng Third Middle School.The qualitative research is a semi-structured interview with five teachers and ten students who are from several high schools in Yangzhou city. They have all participated in the previous questionnaire survey. The interview was done individually in the form of free discussion and questions ready to be discussed were listed on a sheet of paper. The interviewees all used Chinese to express their ideas. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed later. The transcriptions of the interviews were synthesized and categorized.Detailed analysis of quantitative and qualitative research yields the final findings as follows:First of all. both teachers and students think oral error-correction is necessary and useful to language learning. However, there is a great discrepancy on the question of "correcting all of the oral errors that students make or just correcting parts of the errors that students make ". Most of students expect teachers to correct all of their oral errors, but teachers just hold the opposite opinion. With regard to types of error-correction, both teachers and students think that all the language errors should be corrected no matter these oral errors belong to language forms or language meaning although the students have a stronger desire than the teachers to correct all types of errors. With regard to the timing of error-correction, there is a significant difference between teachers and students, students prefer immediate error-correction, while teachers prefer delayed error-correction.Secondly, in terms of oral error-correction types from the questionnaire survey, teachers’ perception is basically in line with students’ preference. However, according to classroom observations, we find that there exists a difference between teachers" actual practice and students’preference in the order of error-correction types. The order of teachers’actual practice in the classroom is Lexical error-correction> Phonetic error-correction> Grammatical error-correction> Expressive error-correction> Organizational error-correction. However, the order of students’preference is Grammatical error-correction> Phonetic error-correction Lexical error-correction> Organizational error-correction> Expressive error-correction.Thirdly, most of the oral error-correction methods that teachers use in the classroom are basically in accordance with students" expectations except Recast. Most of the students do not hope their teachers use Recast method, that is, they do not like their teachers to reformulate all or part of their utterance or just ignore their errors. However, due to the limitation of class hours. Recast may be more welcomed by the teachers in the actual classroom. What’s more, most of the teachers like to use Elicitation to get the proper answers from the students rather than use Explicit Correction to deal with students’errors.Based on the above findings and the previous researches in this field, it is advisable for teachers to adjust the timing of error-correction according to the different teaching aims. For the purpose of maximizing the efficacy of error-correction, teachers are always recommended to communicate with students and adjust their teaching methods in order to match the students’ preferences. At last, different error-correction methods have different effects on different students; therefore, teachers should better adopt a variety of feedback methods and try to find the more proper ones for each individual student.