An Investigation And Analysis Of Corrective Feedback In High School English Classroom: Learners' Perspective

Corrective feedback is not only a very important research topic in the field of second language acquisition,but also a crucial means of second language classroom teaching.Many scholars have studied the definition,classification and function of corrective feedback from different aspects,but few studies research the corrective feedback from learners' perspective.The present study attempts to find out the relationship between teachers' corrective feedback and learners' errors in high school English classroom,and learners' attitudes and uptake to corrective feedback.To be specific,the research questions are:(1)What is the relationship between learners' language error types and teacher's corrective feedback?(2)What is learners' uptake to teacher's corrective feedback?(3)What are learners' attitudes and preferences to different corrective feedback types?In the present study,90 senior one students of two classes and their corresponding English teachers from No.3 senior high school in Funing District of Qinhuangdao participated in the data collection.Through classroom observation,questionnaire and interview,the findings are as follows:(1)Teacher's corrective feedback types are connected with learners' error types.In this study,lexical errors and phonological errors are the most frequent errors appeared among the learners being observed.Therefore,teachers provide corrective feedback on lexical errors and phonological errors more frequently,and phonological errors receive the highest rate of corrective feedback.Prompt and recast use more frequently than explicit correction.Phonological errors mainly lead to recast,lexical errors and grammatical errors usually lead to teacher's prompt,and pragmatic errors mostly followed by explicit correction.(2)Teacher's corrective feedback leads to learners' uptake,and learners' uptake can be mainly divided into three types: uptake,nonverbal uptake and no uptake.There is a correlation between teacher's corrective feedback types and learners' uptake.Among different types of corrective feedback,prompt is the most effective one to receive students' uptake,next is recast.Explicit correction usually leads to nonverbal uptake,and no uptake mostly caused by recast.(3)Most of the learners hold positive attitudes on corrective feedback,and they think errors should not be ignored.In learners' view,delayed correction is better than correct immediately so that their utterances will not be interrupted.Teacher's correction is better than peer correction and whole class correction,and they think all the errors appear in class should be corrected.What's more,in learners' opinion,the correction of grammatical errors is needed more than other errors.The second are phonological and pragmatic errors,while the least is lexical errors.Learners prefer to use recast on phonological errors,and prompt is the best choice for lexical and grammatical errors.Both explicit correction and prompt are preferred to be used on pragmatic errors.Based on the findings,this study presents some implications.Teachers should provide suitable corrective feedback strategies on learners' errors selectively,and prompt is a good way for learners who have the ability to correct errors by themselves.Besides,teachers should lead learners' attention to language meaning rather than language forms.Finally,this study provides the research limitation.For instance,the sample size of the study is small,and the record material of observation is limited.The actual effect of the research findings need a long term exam and most of the factors about students' attitudes are included in the questionnaire,but there may be some factors left out.