An Investigation Into The Students' Attitudes Towards Error Correction In English Classroom At Junior High School

Students' error correction is an effective tool for teachers to interact with students in the classroom, which has a profound impact on students' language input and output. The students' attitudes toward the classroom error correction play a very important role to the learners' classroom language acquisition and the improvement of the teachers' teaching efficiency. Junior high school is an important period for students to learn English, which is a key stage to develop students' interest. Learners' attitudes toward the classroom error correction have important influence on the students' interest in English learning. This study adopts the questionnaire and interview to investigate the students' attitudes towards the classroom error correction and reveals the different level of junior high school students' attitudes toward the aspects like effectiveness of error correction, whether errors should be corrected, when errors should be corrected, which error should be corrected and who should correct the errors, and students' attitudes toward the corrective feedback. And combining with the surveys, the author proposes some practical teaching suggestions for the front-line teachers.Through the research, the author finds that almost all the students believe that their errors should be corrected in the classroom, and errors have positive influence on the English learning. Besides, error correction can help the students to learn English better and avoid committing the same error in a high degree. Their enthusiasm of English learning will not be affected badly. About error correction type, most high level students want their teachers to correct their grammatical errors more but correct their lexical and pragmatic errors less. However, for the low level students, they think almost all their errors should be corrected more, and their phonological errors should be paid less attention to correct. About the correction time, both the high level and the low level students put emphasis on delayed correction after they expressed their opinions. To the low level students, they also want their errors to be corrected after class, particularly the grammatical errors. About the correction subject, most high level students prefer the self correction under the teachers' guidance, and most low level students choose the teacher correction. When the students commit of errors during the process of answering the teachers' question on their own, most high level students choose to correct errors by themselves with the help of the teachers' guidance; the low level students want the teacher to correct their errors. When committing errors during the process of doing the group discussion or the activity, most high level students still want to correct their own errors on their own under the teachers' guidance. However, the low level students' choice has been changed; they want the whole class or the group members to help them correct the errors. In fact, most of the high level students and the low level students feel easier to accept the teacher correction and the peer correction. About the correction feedback way, the high level students mostly like the form negotiation, and they want to correct the errors by themselves under the guidance of the teachers. Most of low level students like the explicit correction, especially in terms of the lexical errors.In summary, teachers should treat the students' errors rightly, recognizing and emphasizing the students' attitudes toward the classroom error correction, choosing the suitable correcting time, and using the different error correcting ways. At the same time, they should protect students' self-esteem at the different levels, especially for the low level students. In the English teaching classroom, the teacher ought to meet the needs of different-level students to correct errors, and enrich theoretical knowledge of error correction. Meanwhile, enhance the error correction language awareness, strengthen the classroom operations and improve the error correction techniques. In addition, they should promote the self-correction and collective error correction, treat the students' errors of different levels and genders fairly, and thereby improve the efficiency of error correction.