Teacher Corrective Feedback And Student Uptake In EFL Classroom Interaction In Middle School

Since1980s, researchers in second language acquisition have paid more andmore attention in classroom interaction, especially teacher-student interaction. As animportant part of classroom interaction, teacher corrective feedback attractsattention from researchers and scholars both home and abroad. However there arefew empirical studies on corrective feedback and its effect on second languageacquisition in the form of student uptake conducted in typical English as ForeignLanguage class settings in China. Based on Lyster (1998)’s analytic model, distributionof different types of teacher corrective feedback and its relationships with studenterror and uptake in English as Foreign Language class in Chinese middle school areinvestigated with Interaction Hypothesis, Input Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis andNoticing Hypothesis as theoretical foundation. The observational experiment isconducted in Shanghai World Foreign Language Middle School involving4Englishteachers and112students. Data analysis of transcription of all16lessons whichamounts to640minutes implies that:(1) Students make phonological errors most inlearning English in middle school. Teachers prefer recast rather than other two kindsofcorrective feedback in response to student errors. Explicit correction which is thelast preferred corrective feedback move is proved to be most effective in invitingrepair.(2) Teachers tend to choose a certain type of corrective feedback in responseto a certain type of students’ error. Phonological errors, lexical errors are usuallyfollowed by recasts as corrective feedback moves, while grammatical errors invitenegotiations of formas the most popular corrective feedback moves among all threetypes of feedback. More errorsof one type initiate more corrective feedback movesand more feedback moves lead to more uptake. That is to say, teacher correctivefeedback has a close relationship with student uptake, too. Recast invites most ofphonological and lexical uptake while negotiation of form leads to most grammaticaluptake.(3) Explicit correction is proved to be the most effective type of correctivefeedback following student error in initiating uptake and repair although it is of thelowest rate of all three kinds of corrective feedback in response to all errors. Recast leads to most non-uptake due to its ambiguity. Theoretically, empirical evidence isprovided that explicit correction or explicit feedback is of greater effect over recastwhich stands for implicit feedback in initiating student uptake, which implies that thedevelopmental effect of corrective feedback has a close relationship with its degreeof salience. Pedagogically, among implications drawn on the findingsare: teachersshould adopt explicit correction tactically and unobtrusively in order to attractstudents’ roving attention without hindering students’ form-meaning mapping;linguistic and paralinguistic cues can beadopted to show teachers’ correctiveintention in order to avoid the ambiguity of recast; teachers should take studentscharacteristics and language ability into consideration in prompting them to producemodified output by negotiation of form; more time should be provided to students todetect the mismatch between their output and the input in teachers’ feedback andto modify their problematic output.