A Study Of Corrective Feedback In College English Classrooms

Numerous studies suggest that interaction between teachers and students in the second language or foreign language classrooms can provide an opportunity for learners to approach the target language, then the learners can get useful feedback and produce more comprehended output for language acquisition development. Teachers' corrective feedback, a medium of interaction, plays an important role in studies of L2 or FL classrooms. The range of feedback is extremely varied while this study mainly focuses on CF application in College English classrooms. It is designed to explore the main CF types frequently used by teachers in College English classrooms, whether CF types are related to learner error types and investigate whether there is a discrepancy in acceptability of CF types between teachers and students.Based on observations of 24 classes of 6 English teachers with 18 hours of audio-recordings, questionnaires of 6 teachers and 154 students and follow-up interviews of 4 teachers and 12 students in Hunan University, Hunan Normal University and Central South University of Forestry and Technology, the study arrives at the following conclusions:(1) teachers frequently used recast and elicitation in College English classrooms, which occupied 37.1% and 22.3% respectively; (2) CF types were related to learner error types. Teachers in College English Classrooms adopted recast and explicit correction more frequently to deal with phonological errors, elicitation to correct lexical errors, metalinguistic feedback to do with grammatical errors and explicit correction to treat pragmatic errors; (3) there exists discrepancy in acceptability of CF types across different errors between teachers and students in College English classrooms. Teachers accepted elicitation most to deal with lexical, grammatical and pragmatic errors while students accepted explicit correction to correct these errors. Besides, the study also indicates that there was a gap between the CF types frequently used by teachers and CF types most accepted by students and inconsistency also lay in CF types most accepted and CF types frequently used by teachers. The discrepancy is probably relevant to the different attitudes to CF types and preferences for them, meanwhile, teachers would concern students' feelings, proficiency level, teaching schedules and other factors when correcting errors while students focused more on the efficacy of correction.The study is limited by the sample of teachers' questionnaires; besides, it does not take the individual differences of the subjects into consideration; however, the study results bring implications for teachers to make use of CF to improve the pedagogical effects and help students produce more comprehended output for the language acquisition development.