An Empirical Study On Self-correction Ability Of Oral English Learning For English Majors

As a tool of communication, English is widely used all around the world. Nowadays, Englishlearning is adopted all over our country and becomes more and more important. However, Englishlearning is a second language acquisition for students in China, compared with the native speakers. Whendelivering a speech, students will make errors and inappropriate expressions every now and then. In reallife communication, therefore, students· oral English ability needs to be strengthened for the practical use.In the present study, the author adopts the definition of self-correction promoted by Green, P. S. andHecht, K.(1993) who regard self-correction as a useful tool to produce more comprehensible output and animportant factor indicating language learning. As for the classification of self-correction, the authordivides the types into five parts according to the studies of Levelt (1983), van Hest, E.(2000), Wen Qiufangand Zhuang Yilin (2005), which are:1) phonetic self-correction;2) lexical self-correction;3) grammaticalself-correction;4) syntactic self-correction;5) self-correction of content. Furthermore, based on Lysterand Ranta·s (1997) oral error-correction strategies, the author wants to find out which kinds of strategiesthe oral English teacher adopts in the process of oral English teaching in the present study. Based on therelated studies in previous years, the author claims that self-correction is a very useful way to develop oralEnglish ability and does a study which focuses on self-correction ability of oral English learning forEnglish majors, and the methods English majors and their oral English teacher respectively adopted whichcan help students develop their self-correction ability.The subjects of the present study are62English major students and their oral English teacher fromNorth University of China. The author employs four instruments to do the research, such as classroomobservation, questionnaire survey, interview and oral English self-correction ability checklist. Thisresearch paper means to solve the following questions:1) What is the classroom performance of Englishmajor students on self-correction and which types of self-correction that English major students mainlyfocus on when they are doing a speech?2) What are the views of English major students and the oralEnglish teacher towards self-correction?3) From the perspectives of both English major students and oralEnglish teacher, which kinds of strategies can help English major students to develop self-correction ability?4) What are the correlations between self-correction ability and oral English ability? These research questions are designed by the author to test and verify the previous studies related to self-correction.The collected data in the present study are analyzed by SPSS17.0and Excel software. And thefindings show that:1) The English major students have the consciousness to correct their own errors. Theresults of both classroom observation and questionnaire survey show that English major students mainly doself-correction of content and phonetic self-correction when they are giving a speech, which are differentfrom the results of the previous studies. The probable reason causing the differences is that the subjects ofthe present study are freshmen majoring in English from the North University of China.2) The Englishmajor students and their oral English teacher have realized the necessity of developing students·self-correction ability. There are still almost half of the students hold the view that self-correction is morehelpful for improving the students·oral English ability than teacher-correction even though the oral Englishteacher and almost the other half of the students have the opponent opinion.3) The English majorstudents use some strategies to develop self-correction ability, such as listening to English news, watchingEnglish movies or TV shows, and reading English novels or English newspapers to imitate the standardEnglish pronunciation and expressions. And their oral English teacher adopts the elicitation (which isregarded as the most effective strategy by Lyster and Ranta) and clarification requests strategies putforward by Lyster and Ranta to help students to develop self-correction ability. But the previous studiesseldom do the research to find out the strategies English majors themselves can adopt to developself-correction ability, and to test and verify which kinds of error-correction strategies oral English teacherprefer to adopt during the speech of the students.4) English major students· self-correction ability ishighly positive correlated to their oral English ability, which can test and verify the results of the relatedprevious studies.In addition, the thesis elaborates the limitations of the present study, and presents some educationalsuggestions and recommendations for further study on self-correction.