A Case Study On Junior High School Teachers’ Oral Corrective Feedback Beliefs And Practices In EFL Classroom Context

In the course of moving forward through developmental stages in foreign language acquisition, it is inevitable that language learners will commit various kinds of linguistic errors in an effort to use the target language. In their teaching practices, EFL teachers are often confronted with the questions raised by Hendrickson (1978, as cited in Chaudron,1988):Should learners’errors be corrected? When should learners’errors be corrected? Which errors should be corrected? How should errors be corrected? Who should do the correction? Therefore, research into teachers’oral corrective feedback and their beliefs on this is of pedagogic significance.Many theories have lent support for the provision of corrective feedback (CF), including Noticing Hypothesis Interaction Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis, Counterbalance Hypothesis, Relevance Theory, Skill-Learning Theory, Connectionism, Sociocultural Theory, and Delayed-Effect Hypothesis. Moreover, ample empirical studies have proved the effectiveness of error treatment in L2development.With the increasing interest in both corrective feedback and teachers’beliefs, researchers commence investigating CF beliefs of teachers in relation to their CF practices. But up to now, few studies have focused on junior high school teachers’CF beliefs or CF practices. Furthermore, other researchers (Mori,2002; Basturkmen,2012) have suggested the necessity of more studies on teachers’ CF beliefs. Therefore, the present study aims to explore the CF beliefs and instructional practices of junior high school teachers in the English classroom in China in order to deepen the understanding teachers’underlying thoughts and to provide suggestions for teacher training and teachers’ future practices.Six English teachers from a key school in Chongqing were chosen as participants. Classroom observation was employed to collect the data of the teachers’CF practices, while questionnaire and interviews were used to collect the data of teachers’CF beliefs. Five lessons of each teacher were observed and audio-recorded in their natural setting. Then the teachers were handed out the questionnaire to finish, after that, they were interviewed. After the in-depth interview with each teacher, the episodes with errors in the recorded data were transcribed and CF moves in the episodes were coded using the model by Lyster and Ranta (1997). The interview audio-recordings were also transcribed. Then the data were analyzed to present teachers’CF beliefs and classroom practices. After that, the comparisons of the six teachers’CF practices were made and consistency between each teacher’s beliefs and practices was analyzed. The major findings are summarized as follows:Firstly, the teachers hold both similar and divergent CF beliefs. All the teachers hold that it is important to provide students with CF, but some of the teachers are more concerned about the effect that CF brings to exams. In terms of whether to correct, most of the teachers take the teaching foci into consideration and some of them also show concern for the exams, time constraints, activity type, students’individual differences, and so on. As for the agent of correction, all the teachers think that both teachers and students can act as correctors. Regarding correction time, half of them think CF should be provided at the end of students’utterance while the rest hold different opinions. Concerning the errors to be corrected, the teachers attach different importance to different errors, some to grammatical errors, some to phonological errors and some to lexical errors. Teachers’beliefs on correction ways are also diversified. Moreover, there exists belief vacuity in some aspects. To be specific, some teachers do not possess clear awareness on who should provide CF, what CF strategy to use and what students’ preferences are on CF, which may be caused by the fact that they are not up-to-date with the current literature on the issue.Secondly, the six CF strategies identified by Lyster and Ranta (1997) have been found in this study. The teachers provide seven CF moves per hour on average, which is very infrequent. Recast is the most frequently employed CF strategy in this study, which accounts for47%, while prompts (which include repetition, elicitation, clarification request, and metalinguistic feedback) amount to41%and explicit correction takes up12%.Thirdly, there exist CF provision differences among the teachers. Some teachers’ CF practices are better than others.Lastly, the teachers’beliefs seem to influence their CF behavior to a large extent, which shows the necessity of training, but there also exists inconsistency between teachers’CF beliefs and CF practices. The inconsistency reveals the contradiction of the sub-beliefs, teachers’concern for the NECS or exams, and restraints which result from some objective factors such as time.Based on the findings, the following courses of action have been put forward. It is recommended that teachers get updated with the latest research on CF so that they can provide CF more consciously; learn more teaching approaches and theories about language learning and error correction; investigate students’preferences for corrective feedback; make students know corrective feedback is important for their language development; combine corrective feedback with formative assessment in accuracy-oriented activities; concentrate on behavior instead of intent; expect high on the student who commits errors; provide CF together with praise and carry out more activities which aim at communication. It is advisable that teacher educators offer more training on corrective feedback to pre-service and in-service teachers, use case study so that the training can be more specific, and ask teachers to make recordings of their teaching and use instances of error correction in the recordings as a basis for discussion and reflection.The present thesis has some limitations as well, which result from the defects of the methodology and some objective factors such as the large size of students which makes the audio-recording difficult. Future studies could include more participants and employ more data-collection instruments such as stimulated-recall.