An Investigation Of Teachers’ Error Correction Behaviors In The Intermediate Spoken Chinese Class

Correcting errors made by international students in Chinese learning is necessary for teachers of Chinese. Through this process, the teacher will learn about the learning conditions by analyzing their linguistic errors before they can take effective language teaching measures. Meanwhile, the learners will modify themselves and make quicker progress in this process. Therefore, error correction is the vital link in Chinese teaching and learning.Targeting at three teacher of intermediate spoken Chinese, this thesis observed their behavior in error correction in classroom and found their patterns as follows:there is a high frequency of correcting phonetic and lexical errors while a low one of correcting grammatical and pragmatic errors; ways of correcting are varied in that generally restatement is most frequent while lexical, grammatical and pragmatic errors are corrected through negotiating between the teacher and the student; in most circumstances, the teacher correct the student right away in class.To investigate the attitudes of Central Asian Chinese learners, this thesis implemented a questionnaire. The result showed that the learners maintained a positive attitude to error correction. A majority of them hoped to be corrected regularly, especially the grammatical errors. They liked explicit and delayed corrections. 76% of them hoped that the teacher correct their language learning errors.Further, this thesis analyzed the factors affecting the ideal correction behavior of the learners in order to help teachers improve their correction effectiveness. It found that factors of nationality, age and language proficiency produced an impact on the learner’s understanding of the ideal error correction behavior.On the basis of the findings above, this thesis proposed relevant measures to be taken in Chinese teaching and learning.