A Study On Foreign Teachers’ Corrective Feedback And Learners’ Uptake In Oral English Classroom

In the past two decades, the impact of corrective feedback on learners’ uptakehas always been a controversial topic among second language acquisition researchers.The effects of teachers’ corrective feedback can be affected by many factors, such asindividual differences, corrective feedback techniques and the environment ofproducing corrective feedback. These factors can have different impacts on secondlanguage learners, either positive or negative. Therefore, in order to make correctivefeedback more productive and effective, it is suggested that second language teachersshould employ different kinds of corrective feedback techniques in terms of students’individual differences as well as their cognitive level, and the length of correctivefeedback should not be too long. What is more, teachers should provide learners withmore opportunities to correct the errors by themselves.In China, there are a number of researches about the relationship betweenteachers’ corrective feedback and learners’ uptake, however, only a few studies werefocused on the relationship between foreign teachers’ corrective feedback andlearners’ uptake. Therefore, this paper expounds the relationship between foreignteachers’ corrective feedback and students’ uptake in oral English classroom，with theintention of helping language teachers form an appropriate understanding ofcorrecting errors in language teaching. The research is mainly done by observation,recording, and analysis, of which five foreign teachers were involved, with eachteacher2lessons, totaling8.3hours. There were three major findings，firstly, over70%students in oral English class held the belief that every error in oral Englishshould be treated, while the foreign teachers differed in this issue, who argued that toomuch oral corrective feedback can bring many side effects. Secondly, grammaticalerrors appeared most frequently, but little corrective feedback was received, because the foreign teachers thought correcting students’ errors would make studentsfrustrated. Corrective feedback occurred only when learners can not make themselvesunderstood. Thirdly, as for vocabulary errors, foreign teachers tended to employelicitation which leads to a high rate of uptake.