English Teachers’ Corrective Feedback And Students’ Uptake In Senior High School Classroom

Research on second language acquisition (SLA) classroom has claimed that teacher talk performs a crucial role in students’learning of the target language. It is argued that teachers’ corrective feedback, as a main part of teacher discourse, will promote students’ output by encouraging them toparticipate in the interaction, give related signals to help notice the gap between their interlanguage and the target language, and provide more information of the target language to help internalize and improve students’ language system. Most of previous studies of teachers’ feedback focus on the interaction between students’ error and teachers’feedback, while few studies, to date, have showed much concern for students’ reactions (uptake) to teachers’ feedback, which might well demonstrate whether students understand the target linguistic forms or not.The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between senior high school English teachers’ corrective feedback and students’uptake, which was aimed at promoting better interaction between teachers and students. The research questions addressed are set as follows:(1) What is the distribution pattern of corrective feedback and uptake in senior high school classroom? (2) What features of corrective feedback may affect students’uptake and repair? The data was obtained from the recordings of English lessons by two different teachers in senior high school. Based on the Analytic Model (Lyster,1997), the transcripts of the classroom recordings amounting to 18 hours were analyzed and discussed.The major findings are drawn in the following:(1) In English classes, teachers tended to recast students’ errors, especially grammatical errors. However, as opposed to recasts, students tended to uptake teachers’negotiation of form. In particular, clarification request was found to result in highest level of uptake, and elicitation, most frequency of repair.(2) Students were more likely to perceive teachers’feedback when teachers tended to "focus on meaning" and more likely to accept corrective feedback which addressed their phonological errors. Besides, it led to students’more uptake when teachers addressed the linguistic problems in the way of direct negotiation. It is also worth mentioning that more students’repair occurred when teachers and students were negotiating in complex moves.Some implications can be obtained based on the findings for classroom teaching.(1) Teachers need diversify their corrective feedback techniques with explicit corrective intention. Particularly, teachers should select negotiation of form such as clarification request and elicitation to encourage students’more self-repair and peer-repair.(2) Teachers had better provide more opportunities and more time to address the linguistic problems. Meanwhile, teachers need treat students’ errors in an explicit and direct way. Furthermore, various communicative activities should be designed to offer students more chances to output the target language.Generally, teachers’ treatments of students’errors in classroom teaching indeed have a significant effect on students’ uptake, which enables students to expose themselves to more input of the target language, gets students to attend more to the classroom interaction, and pushes students to generate more target-like output.