An Investigation On Teachers’ And Students’ Views On English Errors And Error Treatment Methods In Senior High Schools English Class

Making mistakes is a common phenomenon in language learning. Since the1950s,more and more researches focus on views on errors and error treatment in foreign languageclassroom. A lot of researchers have made great contributions on the views on error anderror treatment from different perspective. However, in China, until now there are fewempirical studies on teachers’ and students’ error and error treatment in English classroomin senior high school. The present research investigates the teachers’ and students’ views onEnglish errors and error treatment methods in senior high schools English class. The aim ofthe study attempts to promote teachers’ error treatment, and to facilitate teachers andstudents to progress together in English learning in China.The survey was conducted mainly through questionnaires and interviews to find outthe teachers’ and students’ views on English errors and error treatment methods. Thesubjects in the questionnaire survey were20teachers and160students in two senior highschools in Hebei Province. In the interview3teacher participants (1male and2females)and7student participants (5males and2females) are selected randomly. Thequestionnaire of this study was designed on the basis of the questionnaire used in QianRong’s thesis Error Correction in College English Class---A Survey in Guangxi NormalUniversity (2005). Some revisions are made according to the research questions and thesituation of the subjects. With the help of the software SPSS13.0，the descriptive analysiswas used to analyze the responses of the questionnaire.Through the data analysis, the research results are as follows: first of all, both teachersand students prefer to correct the errors of intonation and grammar; secondly, almost all theteachers think it is important to use peer or group correction. But most of the senior highschool students hope that error treatment should be carried out by teachers in the Englishlanguage learning rather than students; thirdly, although most teachers like to point out thestudents’ mistakes after finishing speech, they also want to use facial expressions and bodylanguage to treat errors immediately. On the contrary, most of the students hope that errortreatment occurs after class. For the lexical errors, students hope the correction occurs immediately; fourthly, the teacher thinks that reducing their error treatment can encouragethe students to speak English.Based on the findings, this study provides some useful implications. First, teachersshould respect students’ self-esteem and learning enthusiasm, which makes teachers usedifferent error treatments appropriately and flexibly in order to promote students’ learning.Second, teachers should improve their theory of error treatment, grasp the time of errortreatment, and strengthen class operation and improve the techniques of error treatment.Third, teachers should give different error treatments to different students.