A Study On Teachers’ Corrective Feedback And Learners’ Uptake In Junior High School English Classroom Interaction

Classroom interaction arouses great interest of the researchers in classroom discourse analysis from1980s. Corrective feedback is an important measure of classroom interaction, as a teaching strategy ofteacher to identify error. It is said to have effect on students’ uptake. The studies on corrective feedback andstudents’ uptake have been widely carried out in the field of classroom SLA abroad, while in China,researchers have mainly from the angle of the theoretical perspectives and few empirical classroominteraction studies are conducted.The present study is adapted from the research by Lyster and Ranta (1997), and Lyster (1998a) forthe reason that it is a descriptive study of the types of feedback most used by teachers and the types offeedback that lead to uptake. Error types are classified as grammatical, phonological, and lexical.Corrective feedbacks are divided into six types, namely, explicit correction, recast, clarification request,metalinguistic, elicitation, and repetition. The present study aims at finding out the relationship betweenteacher corrective feedback and student uptake, and the students’ attitudes and preferences toward differenttypes of corrective feedback. What’s more, it attempts to explore the potential influence of teachercorrective feedback on foreign language development of middle school students.The data of the present study are collected from the classroom observation of24English lessons inAnyang No.7Middle School. Two teachers are from Grade7and Grade8. Each of them has12lessonsjoined in this study. Totally,24lessons are observed. Each lesson lasts40minutes, the classroomobservation altogether960minutes are recorded. By means of classroom observation as well asquestionnaire and interview, the data and some other information are collected, based on which the majorfindings are presented as follows:(1) Grammatical error is the most frequent type of errors responded with teachers’ corrective feedback.Recast is the feedback type most preferred by teachers.(2) The students respond to most of the teachers’ corrective feedback in a repaired or needs-repairedform. Recast results in the least student repairs. Elicitation is the most effective feedback type in causingstudent-generated repairs, but not fully exploited by teachers; negotiation of form (clarification request, metalinguistic, elicitation, and repetition) facilitates grammatical repairs, while recast and explicitcorrection favor phonological repairs.(3) A great number of the students hold a very positive attitude toward corrective feedback of theirteachers. They hope the teacher can correct all the errors, not just correct those that hinder communication.The present paper is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction of the background,the significance, purpose of this study as well as the main structure of this paper. Chapter two is theliterature review. It mainly introduced the major terms which are relevant to the present study, such as thedefinition of corrective feedback and uptake as well as the classification of corrective feedback and uptake.Meanwhile, the theoretical foundations are also concerned. Chapter three describes the research design indetail. The research questions, subjects, research methods and the process of data collection are all includedin this chapter. Chapter four presents the results of the study and make a discussion on results of the study.Chapter five is a conclusion of the present study, making a summary of the major findings of this researchas well as the limitations of the present study and the suggestions for the future study.