Oral Corrective Feedback And Learner Uptake In Classroom Interaction

Since1980s, interactions in the second language classroom have been targets of theinvestigation for researchers working in the field of second language acquisition.Corrective feedback, as an important aspect of interaction, is the center of the studies.Many researches have confirmed that corrective feedback plays a positive role in languageacquisition. The current research indicates that corrective feedback in classroom settinghas been considered to serve the function of offering students’ opportunities to focus onforms of the language, notice the gap between the input they are exposed to and theirproduction, and push the students to repairs, thereby promoting the development ofinterlanguge.Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) research model was used in the current study. The databasewas drawn from transcripts of audio-recordings of18English lessons of six junior middleschool teachers in Huanggang city. The purpose of this research is to reveal the answers tothe following four questions.1. What is the relationship between the frequency of errortypes and the frequency of corrective feedback provision?2. What is the relationshipbetween student errors and corrective feedback?3. What is the relationship betweencorrective feedback and learner uptake? The major findings of the present study are asfollows:1. The frequency of the corrective feedback for different error types reflects therates at which these types of errors occurred. Among the three types of errors,phonological errors were the most frequent and received the most corrective feedback.Lexical errors were the least and received the least corrective feedback.2. Teachersshowed a low tolerance to students’ errors, especially grammatical errors.96%ofgrammatical errors were provided with different types of corrective feedback.3. Recastwas the dominant type of corrective feedback.4. Teachers tended to choose correctivefeedback in light of error types. Phonological errors usually led to recasts. Grammaticalerrors were usually followed by prompts. Lexical errors tend to receive explicit correctionand prompt.5. Elicitation led to the highest rate of uptake and repair, while explicitcorrection led to the lowest rate of uptake and repair.6. The types of corrective feedback are correlated to the types of students repair. Recasts tended to lead to phonological repairs.Prompt were prone to elicit grammatical repair and lexical repairs.Findings of the current research provide some pedagogical implications for theEnglish as a foreign language classroom teaching: for instance, although the correctivefeedback plays an important role in students’ language acquisition, teachers shouldn’tcorrect every error of students; teachers should use different types of corrective feedbackaccording the demand and language proficiency of students, instead of overuse of recasts;meanwhile teachers should give students more time to repair their errors.