A Survey Study On Oral Error Corrective Feedback In English Majors' Class

The occurrence of error is the inevitable result in the process of the second language acquisition.Since the 1950 s,the role of the corrective feedback in the second language acquisition has always been a controversial issue.In recent years,many linguists have realized the importance of the corrective feedback in the second language acquisition and they have conducted a series of studies focus on the corrective feedback in English class.Researchers like Lyster,Long,Chaudron and Ranta have designed some effective techniques and research models for future researches to study the oral error corrective feedback which takes place in the second language acquisition class.Chaudron put forward five-question model which focuses on the corrective feedback.It includes whether to correct,what to correct,when to correct,how to correct and who to correct.Based on Chaudron' five-question model,the study tries to investigate English majors' and their teachers' attitudes towards the oral error corrective feedback and find out the difference between their attitudes.Finally,the author tries to provide some suggestions for teachers in English majors' teaching.The instruments which are employed in this paper include questionnaire and interview.There are two questionnaires employed in the present study,which are all adopted from Ji Xiaowei's(2010)research.One of them is student questionnaire and the other one is teacher questionnaire.The survey is conducted in Inner Mongolia Normal University and Baotou Teachers' College and 150 students and 35 teachers who are from these universities take part in the survey.After the questionnaire,the author chose 10 students and 5 teachers randomly and interview them.The findings of the research suggest that there are significant differences existed between students' and teachers' attitudes toward the oral error corrective feedback in English class for some different reasons.(1)For whether to correct students' oral errors,both students and teachers show positive attitudes towards it.Most students think that each error in their utterance should be treated,while teachers think that it should be corrected selectively;(2)For what to correct,teachers think that the error which needs to be focused is grammar errors.Whereas,students think that pragmatic errors and grammar errors are the errors which need to be focused;(3)When it comes to when to correct,the majority of the teachers prefer to correct after students have finished with the expression;some students agree with correction afterwards and some students tend to be corrected immediately;(4)For how to correct,teachers are prone to provide meta-linguistic feedback and students tendto get the explicit correction;(5)The majority of the students believe that teachers should be the conductor of the corrective feedback.While teachers think different conductors should be responsible for different kind of errors.Based on the analysis of the data and the interview,the author comes up with some pedagogical suggestions in the last part of the paper.When teachers decide to provide corrective feedback,they should take students' language proficiency,characteristic and their preference type of corrective feedback into consideration.At the same time,teachers should remember that they should treat students with affirmative,respectful and friendly attitude in the process of corrective feedback.