A Case Study On An English Teacher's Oral Corrective Feedback In A Senior High School

This study is based on the categorization of corrective feedback and error by Lyster and Ranta(1997).The current study takes an English teacher and 55 students in Class 11,Grade One in Yan Daojie Middle School as the study subjects.The author takes classroom observation,questionnaire and interview to collect data and does analysis and discussion by quantitative and qualitative methods in order to solve three research questions as follows:1)What kind of oral corrective feedback does the senior high school teacher use in class?2)What are the attitudes and expectations of students of different genders towards the teacher's oral corrective feedback?3)What are the attitudes and expectations of students with different language proficiency levels towards the teacher's oral corrective feedback?Through analyzing the data,the author finds that 1)In general,the teacher in Class 11 mostly uses recast and explicit correction.2)Girls are more sensitive to the teacher's oral corrective feedback and have higher anxiety.As for phonological errors,boys and girls have same attitudes towards the teacher's oral corrective feedback: most of them expect the teacher to use explicit correction.However,boys and girls have different attitudes towards the teacher's oral corrective feedback on lexical errors and grammatical errors: as for lexical errors,except for recast and explicit correction,boys also expect the teacher to use clarification request,while girls also accept elicitation.As for grammatical errors,many girls expect the teacher to use recast and metalinguistic clues while many boys prefer recast and elicitation.3)students with low English proficiency level have higher anxiety than students with mediate and high English proficiency level.As for phonological errors,nearly all students expect the teacher to use explicit correction.As for lexical errors,students with high level expect the teacher to use explicit correction and elicitation.Students with mediate and low level expect the teacher to use recast and explicit correction.As for grammatical errors,even though most students with different levels all accept recast,however,a few students with high level expect the teacher to use explicit correction,a few students with mediate level expect the teacher to use metalinguistic clues and a few students with low level expect the teacher to use elicitation.Based on the result of the study,the author suggests that teachers should pay more attention to the differences of students,such as their genders and English proficiency levels and care more about the students' emotion.The author suggests that teachers use implicit ways or combine several types of oral corrective feedback to correct errors mostly and praise the students more in order to improve students' confidence and promote the efficiency of learning.