A Study On The Patterns Of The Corrective Feedback In Secondary School EFL Classrooms

Errors are unavoidable in language learning. Learners need negative evidence; it is, therefore, a common phenomenon that the teacher provides learners with corrective feedback. In fact, the corrective feedback is an important part of the English classroom communication between teachers and students; it accounts for a considerable proportion (Cazden,1988). Corrective feedback has been a very important topic for research in the field of second language acquisition.Since the late 1980s, some studies have explored corrective feedback either from theoretical perspectives (Dai,1990; Mou,2004) or from the perspective of error analysis (Dai & Shu,1994, Fan,2002). This study is based on Krashen's (1982) Input Hypothesis, Swain's Output Hypothesis (1985) and Long's Interaction Hypothesis (1981,1983,1989) in the second language acquisition as criteria for evaluating its impacts on students'learning. This thesis explores the following three questions:(1) What are the different patterns of CF and their distribution in communicative-oriented EFL classrooms?(2) Can choice of corrective feedback patterns be dependent on types of errors?(3) Are patterns of CF dependent on teachers'background like age and gender?In this study, sixteen secondary school EFL classes were chosen, which were rewarded in the 8th National Junior English Teaching Competition in 2010 and were carried out under the guidance of English New Curriculum. After the observation, the video-recorded data are fully transcribed using normal orthography. On the basis of data analysis, I obtain the following conclusions:? The amount of teachers'CF differs in different types of errors; ? According to the patterns of CF, the ratios of different kinds of CF are totally different. Corrective feedback rates of errors are not directly proportional to the frequency of errors, and teachers'corrective feedback on phonetic errors is the strictest, while they are comparatively tolerant of the lexical and pragmatic errors. ? The correlation coefficient between patterns of CF and teachers' background, like age and gender, is comparatively low.The study of patterns of corrective feedback in secondary school EFL classrooms is of great theoretical and practical value. Theoretically, it is helpful for us to investigate the roles of positive and negative evidence in SLA. Practically, the study of CF can provide guidance to the teachers' teaching and help them choose a type of appropriate CF to facilitate foreign language development. Therefore, more efforts should be focused on it.