A Study On Students’ Error Correction Needs In Junior High English Classroom

For foreign language learners, making errors are not inevitable. The making of errors is the process of learners’ language acquisition. So error correction becomes an important issue to be addressed in language classroom. However, in the classroom teaching, whether teachers can effectively carries on the error correction, it has a certain impact for language acquisition.The thesis is an investigation on error correction of teachers’ actual practice in junior high English classroom. In this study, both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted. Through quantitative and qualitative methods, the study intends to investigate the teachers’ and learners’ attitudes towards error correction, find the differences of the teachers’ actual practice and students’ needs and probe into the reason of the differences.Trough the data analysis, the research yields the final findings as followed: first of all, as for‘whether errors should be corrected’,both teachers and students think errors should be corrected and error correction is useful to improve the proficiency of English. However, there is a great discrepancy on the question of ‘correcting all of the errors that students make or correcting the errors that influence communication’. Most of students expect teachers to correct all of their errors, but teachers just hold the opposite opinion. Teachers think the errors that don’t effect the communication can be ignored for the limited teaching time, but the students think the teachers should not only pay attention to the language meaning but also the language forms. Meanwhile,students will not feel losing face because of teachers’ error correction, but teachers will pay much attention on students’ psychology when they correct students’ error. In a word, Both teachers and students think oral error-correction is necessary and useful to language learning. However, students have more positive attitude on error correction relative to teachers.Second, students feel satisfied on when and who correct the errors. Students hope that errors should be corrected after their expressions. At the same time, They prefer teachers correct their errors. However, there exists a difference on error-correction methods between students’ needs and teachers’ practice. Students hope teachers can correct their errors directly, but teachers are more inclined to use recast in the actual classroom.According to the findings, some suggestions are given to the teachers when they correct the errors in the class. At the same time, Some limitations and recommendations for further research in this field are also described.