Teacher Phonological Corrective Feedback And Its Effectiveness In Senior High English Classrooms

Corrective feedback (also known as error correction) has been a hot and controversialissue in SLA (second language acquisition) since the1990s. The role and its contributionSLA theory and second language teaching have been a major domain of investigation.Based on the Noticing Hypothesis, the Interaction Hypothesis and the ComprehensibleOutput Hypothesis, corrective feedback has proved to provide language learners withopportunities to notice the gap between the target language input and their owninterlanguage forms, negotiate what is correct, invite pushed output, and consequently assistinterlanguage development. Although a plethora of studies on the effectiveness of differentcorrective feedback moves on certain linguistic forms have been carried out (e.g. Carrolland Swain; Lyster; Ellis et al.; Panova and Lyster; Han; Shi; Shen; Zhang; Yang and Lin etal.), most of them are either descriptive or empirical. Few of them have studied theeffectiveness of corrective feedback in both ways. Also, these studies have focused onvarious kinds of linguistic forms, but few have explored students’ pronunciation errorsparticularly. Combining descriptive method and experimental method, the present studyaimed to investigate the effectiveness of teacher corrective feedback on studentpronunciation.The study was carried out in Sang Zhi No.1Middle School, Hu Nan province. Theresearch instruments include classroom observations and a quasi-experimental study. Threespecific questions are asked:1. What corrective feedback move is preferred by participatingteachers in correcting student pronunciation errors in10Chinese senior English classrooms?2. How is student uptake after teacher corrective feedback distributed?3. Can teachercorrective feedback improve student pronunciation? And if yes, which corrective feedbackmove can better improve student pronunciation? Classroom observations were conducted in30English lessons of10classes. The whole observations lasted about two months. Theresults from classroom observations show that recast was the most frequently used move byparticipating teachers when correcting student pronunciation errors and student successful uptake of recast was comparatively high. However, it should be pointed out that thesuccessful uptake of recast was also influenced by the teaching activity itself. In thequasi-experimental study, forty-eight students were divided into four groups. The fourgroups received negotiation of form, recast, explicit correction and no feedback respectivelyin an oral treatment. After10sessions of oral treatment, an immediate test and a delayed testdesigned on structured/analytical pronunciation were administrated to test students’pronunciation accuracy. According to the results of the two tests which were analyzed bySPSS17.0(Statistical Product and Service Solutions), the comparison group (no feedbackgroup) had the lowest average score and the negotiation group outstripped the other twoexperimental groups (recast group and explicit group) with the highest average score in boththe immediate test and the delayed test.The following conclusions can be drawn from the combined results of the classroomobservations and the quasi-experimental study: teacher phonological corrective feedbackhas an overall improvement on student pronunciation. Even though recast is preferred byteachers when correcting student pronunciation errors, its effectiveness is unstable andinfluenced by factors like teaching activities and student proficiency. Negotiation of formproved to be the most effective one in the long run.Theoretically, the study reveals that teacher corrective feedback plays a positive role inthe development of learners’ phonological interlanguage system. Pedagogically, it indicatesthat in order to help improve students’ pronunciation accuracy, it’s necessary for Englishteachers to correct student pronunciation errors promptly. When correcting studentpronunciation errors, instead of excessively using recasts, teachers should provide studentswith the opportunities to correct pronunciation errors by themselves. Besides, factors suchas teaching activities, student proficiency and disparity, target phonetic forms should also beconsidered by teachers.