An Investigation On Teachers' Corrective Feedback And Learners' Uptake In Senior High School English Classroom

In the research of classroom teaching,teachers' corrective feedback(CF),as an important component in classroom interaction,has drawn more and more attention from researchers at home and abroad.A number of studies indicate that different types of corrective feedback employed by teachers may lead to varied kinds of learners' uptake,and proper types of CF chosen by teachers welcome more learner repair which will have a positive effect on students' second language acquisition.The researches about types of corrective feedback Chinese teachers prefer to adopt to treat students' errors in English class,and effects of these corrective feedback on students' uptake are rare.Thus,the present study is carried out to investigate these issues.The present study focuses on the following three questions:(1)What respective types of CF do teachers employ on different types of students' errors?(2)What respective kinds of students' uptake will follow different types of teachers' CF toward various errors?(3)What are the teachers' and students' opinions about corrective feedback? The research is carried out in the four classes from Nanyang No.1 Senior High School for one month,among which two classes are from Grade 1 and the other two are from Grade 2,including 249 students and four English teachers.9 lessons are observed in each class and each lesson lasts for 40 minutes.Therefore,altogether 1440 minutes are recorded in the four classes.Based on the classroom observation with recording and note-taking in the observation scale as assistant tools,questionnaire for the students and interview for the teachers,all the data are collected,analyzed and discussed.And the major findings are presented as follows:(1)Among all the six CF types,elicitation is most frequently used by the teachers which is followed by explicit feedback and recast.For phonological errors,the teachers intend to employ explicit feedback.Elicitation and recast are often chosen by teachers for grammatical and lexical errors.While,for expression errors,the teachers always conduct explicit feedback and sometimes elicitation is also adopted.(2)Different learner's uptake may occur following the teachers' varied CF types.In general,metalinguistic feedback leads to more repair from the students.Recast and explicit feedback also result in learner repair to a large extent.However,elicitation and repetition may cause more needs-repair than repair,and even no uptake.Specifically for phonological errors,explicit feedback and recast are effective enough to welcome the students' repair.For grammatical errors,explicit and metalinguistic feedback lead to large parts of learner repair,and recast can be also regarded as a useful way.When it comes to lexical errors,recast,explicit feedback and repetition are all of enough effectiveness.(3)The teachers and students all realize the significance of teachers' CF in English class,especially for those errors which are committed frequently by students.For grammatical errors,the teachers regard them as to be corrected frequently,which also meets the students' abundant needs for CF towards grammatical errors,who choose recast and metalinguistic feedback as their favorite kinds of CF from the teachers.For phonological errors,both of the teachers and students hold the opinion that explicit feedback is quite effective.However,for expression errors,the teachers claim that some expression errors can be ignored.On the contrary,a part of students insist their expression errors be treated first by their teachers.Furthermore,the teachers also claim that apart from the error types,the teaching goals,teaching progress and the students' proficiency in English may make a difference in their adopting CF types.