A Comparative Study Of Teachers And Students’ Perception Of Error Correction In College English Classroom

Errors are inevitable in the process of English learning. From contrastive analysis, error analysis to interlanguage, language errors have been continually studied by researchers in China and abroad. Up to now, there has been no consensus on the perception of error correction in foreign language fields. Some scholars advocate correcting all errors, others insist on tolerating them. Opinions are changing with the implication of different kinds of teaching approaches. Nowadays, teachers are more tolerant to learner’s errors than before. They start to take student’s affective factors into consideration and reduce the corrective behaviors relatively. However, issues such as students’ needs and feelings towards error correction and their consistency to teachers’ actual behaviors are still worth exploring. Therefore, the author attempts a comparative study, aiming to improve the efficiency of error correction under the condition of protecting students’self-esteem.Based on Chaudron’s (1987) five questions and James’(2001) three principles on error correction, and with college English teachers and sophomores of non-English majors from Guangxi Normal University, this research adopts the instruments of questionnaire, interview and classroom observation to probe into college English teachers and students’perception of error correction, trying to answer the following research questions:(1) Do teachers and students hold similar attitude toward error and error correction? (2) Does teachers’ actual behavior match students’ expectations in terms of issues such as what to correct, when to correct, and who to correct? (3) Do students share similar feelings after error correction in terms of gender and English level? And (4) How do teachers keep balance of different kinds of error correction strategies?The results indicate that both teachers and students have realized error correction is important to them. However, there are still some differences in focus on form or meaning, accuracy or fluency. Both teachers and students think immediate correction will cause interruption, and the best occasion is correction after the speaker finishes his speech. What’s more, there are significant differences between teachers and students in their conceptions of correcting phonological error, grammatical error and lexical error, but there exists no obvious difference between teachers and students in terms of expression error and discourse error. Besides, students have different feelings after their errors are corrected. Moreover, teachers choose error correction strategy according to students’ English proficiency rather than gender.Hence, when correcting errors, teachers should not only take error itself and students’ needs into account, but also consider the teaching objectives and the types of class teaching. Only by combining implicit methods with explicit methods can we improve students’ learning initiatives and efficiency rapidly.