Error Correction In College English Class

Making errors is a pretty common phenomenon in the process of foreign language learning. To help students sort the puzzle out and also give some implications about college English teaching, many teachers and linguists have been conducting research on errors correction. Since teachers and students play important roles in English classes, their attitude and needs for error correction are waiting to be found. Considering all these, it is meaningful to conduct a survey to explore the students’ and teachers’ attitudes and expectations of error and error correction.This research was conducted in Jiangxi Normal University exclusively. 150 nonEnglish major students and 20 English participated in this research. In addition, ten teachers and five students were selected to have a semi-structured interview. The research attempted to answer the following research questions:(1) What are the students’ attitudes toward their errors and error correction?(2) What are the teachers’ attitudes toward their students’ errors and error correction?(3) How do teachers correct their students’ errors?(4) When do we need to correct errors?(5) Who do we need to correct errors? To answer these questions, I used both the quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect the data. Finally, the data were put into the Excel file for analysis.After analyzing the data from the quantitative and qualitative research, I cam to several findings as follows: First of all, teachers and students agree that errors are an important part of learning process. However, as for error correction, there is a great discrepancy on correcting of all the errors that students make. Most of the students prefer to correct all of their language errors and actually teachers in the classroom do not always correct students’ errors. As for what do we need to correct, teachers’ actual behavior actually matched the types of students’ mostly occurred errors, that is, grammatical error. Moreover, the order of teachers’ preference in the classroom was pronunciation error > discourse error > grammatical error > lexical error > expression error. However, the order of students’ preference was pronunciation error> expression error>grammatical error>lexical error >discourse error. They agreed on the correction of pronunciation first. Thirdly, as for how to correct, there exist some contradictions between teachers’ classroom practice of error correction and teachers’ belief of what is the most effective correction strategy. Most methods that teachers prefer can mainly satisfy students’ preference, that is, elicitation, recast and explicit. Fourthly, most students like immediate correction and teachers tend to prefer delayed correction. Finally, most students rely on teachers’ correction, and teachers’ actual practice is not in agreement with students’ expectations on who to correct errors in class.On the basis of the findings above, some implications were offered. First, teachers should reconstruct students’ conceptions on error correction and help students form a positive view on error correction. Secondly, teachers should try to match their correction preference to students’ expectations. Thirdly, although teachers meet students’ expectation on correcting grammatical errors, teachers should help student develop their awareness of discourse errors. Fourthly, teachers should correct students’ errors in an appropriate time. Finally, teachers should encourage their students to do peer-correction and self-correction more often.