A Comparative Study Of The Error Correction Behaviors And Students' Expectations In Senior High School English Classroom

Committing errors is unavoidable for learners in the process of foreign language learning. As Corder (1967) put it. a learner's errors are very important in learning language, which contributes to providing evidences of how the language is learned, what strategies the learners have used to acquire language. Error correction is a way in which teachers make response to learners'errors and it is an important problem that teachers have to deal with in senior high school English classroom. When teachers correct learner'errors, they should not only make sure the effectiveness of error correction, but also protect learner's self-esteem. The present study aims to examine whether error correction behaviors are in agreement with students'expectations in senior high school English classroom, so the following three research questions are raised for this check:(1) What error correction behaviors can be observed in the classes? (What errors to be corrected, when to correct them. who to correct them and how to correct them.) (2) What are the students'expectations on error correction in senior high school English classroom? (3) Whether error correction behaviors are in agreement with students" expectations in senior high school English classroom? The questionnaire, classroom observation and interview are employed in this study.The results of the study show:(1) In the classes, phonological and grammatical errors are often corrected while lexical, pragmatic and discourse errors get less attention:as for when to correct errors, most of the errors are corrected after students'expression, but there are also some phonological and grammatical errors corrected immediately; as for who to correct errors, teachers correct the majority of errors, but there also some grammatical errors corrected by students themselves; As for how to correct errors, most of the phonological, pragmatic and discourse errors are corrected directly, lexical and grammatical ones are corrected by eliciting and recasting respectively. (2) As for what errors to correct, grammatical and lexical errors arethe top ones they want to be corrected, then phonological errors and the last one are pragmatic errors; as for when to correct errors, most students want their errors to be corrected after their expression, but for phonological and lexical errors, some students also prefer immediate correction; as for who to correct errors, the majority of students prefer teacher correction; as for how to correct errors, most students want their phonological errors to be corrected by eliciting or given Meta-linguistic feedback and lexical errors to be corrected explicitly. In addition, they hope their grammatical, pragmatic and discourse errors to be corrected by recasting. (3) When it comes to what errors to be corrected, error correction behaviors are not in agreement with students'expectations on phonological and lexical errors; as for when to correct errors, most teachers and students prefer correction after expression. But for phonological errors, there are still some students prefer immediate correction while seldom errors are corrected immediately; when it comes to who to correct errors, both of them prefer teacher correction. But for grammatical errors, nearly half of these errors are corrected by students themselves in the classes; As for how to correct errors, error correction behaviors are not in agreement with students'expectations, because most students are fond of recasts to correct their phonological, pragmatic and discourse errors while teachers correct these errors directly in the classes. In addition, students prefer their lexical errors to be corrected explicitly while teachers adopt elicitation to correct these errors.