A Case Study On Teacher’s Corrective Feedback In Junior High School English Class

For a long time, error in language acquisition has been an important topic and some scholars think it necessary for language acquisition. However, for corrective feedback, many researchers have different opinions. Some researchers believe language acquisition without error correction will lead to fossilization. Nowadays with the prevail of many new teaching methods, such as communicative and task-based teaching methods, teachers tend to tolerate learners’errors and try not to correct learners’ every error. However, if looking into the current language teaching class, students’ language error is still a big problem for teachers because most teachers are not very clear about how to treat errors. And a discrepancy often exits between teachers’error treatment and students’anticipation, even between teachers’ opinion on error and their practice in the real class. So many problems about errors are remained to be solved. The study on error and corrective feedback will offer solutions to some teaching problems and promote English teaching.Three research questions are involved:1. What are the main differences between teacher’s opinion on corrective feedback and students’opinions on it?2. How is corrective feedback going on and what are the effects of corrective feedback in the real class?3. What are the effects of the corrective feedback where teacher and students share different opinions?The paper presents a case study. The subjects of the study are45Grade8 students and one English teacher from Class7in No.2Middle School in Tanggu. The data of the study are collected from questionnaire with the students, classroom observation with14classes of630minutes and interview with the teacher. The errors made by students are divided into the category of grammatical, phonological, lexical, expression and discourse errors. The types of corrective feedback made by the teacher range from explicit feedback, recast, metalinguistic feedback, clarification request, elicitation to repetition.Based on the concerning data analysis, the major findings are as follows:1.There is a gap between teacher and students’opinion on corrective feedback. Students prefer explicit feedback but the teacher does not.2. Teacher’s practice of corrective feedback in class does not quite agree with his opinion and students’ expectation. In many aspects, the teacher’s practice can’t meet students’expectation.3. Among the teacher’s favorable feedback, recast has the lowest rate of student uptake. On the contrary, explicit feedback which the teacher does not like but the students like has the highest rate of uptake with self-correction.In view of the findings, some pedagogical implications have been drawn for the junior high class:1. Teachers need to apply teaching theory into teaching practice so as to narrow the gap between what they think and what they do.2. Teachers should balance the application of recast and explicit feedback in class and properly treat error correction. Besides, the focus of error correction needs to be balanced and students’ preference is very important for language teaching.