A Study On Corrective Feedback Between Students’ Expectations And Teacher’s Actual Practice In Junior High English Classroom

Instead of a process of simple memorization, second language acquisition involves much creativity, usually replete with numerous errors. However, the errors in the foreign language acquisition should not be regarded as bad habits to eradicate, but as sources of insight into the learning process. The making of errors is part of the learning process.The present study is an observation of corrective feedback in the English classroom setting. Through the analysis of teacher’s actual practice in the classroom, the questionnaire on the students and the interview on the teacher and four representative students with the aim to investigating the teacher’s and different level students’perceptions, studying the discrepancy of their preference and probing into the reason of the discrepancy.As for should learner errors be corrected, whether students of high or low level almost all agree that the teacher should correct their errors in the class. This is not in accordance with the teacher who insists that not all errors—unless those hinder the students’thoughts—should be corrected.Talking about when should learner error be corrected, high and low level students put particular emphasis on delayed correction after expressing their opinion. The teacher holds the view that some errors are necessary to be corrected in the class immediately and some she will correct after class.When it comes to who should correct learner error, unlike low level students who may prefer to be corrected by the teacher directly, high level students are inclined to be corrected by themselves after realizing the error or under the teacher’s guidance. The teacher encourages students to correct their errors under the guidance of her and peer correction.With regard to what kind of error should be corrected, most high level students place emphasis on grammatical error. The grammatical error, lexical error and pragmatic error are distributed evenly among low level students. The teacher indicates usually errors occurring in grammar and spelling are negligible, which is totally different from students of all levels of students.As to their preference for a certain type of corrective feedback, an overwhelming proportion of students of all levels are in favor of metalinguistic feedback and think recasts are inappropriate for them. In the classroom observation, repetition is the most frequently used corrective feedback among the six types with recasts and elicitation coming next.Through the research of the corrective feedback in the class, the author attempts to provide some constructive pedagogical implications for English teachers. Some limitations of the present paper and recommendations for further research in this field are also described.