A Survey Of The Effects Of Teachers' Oral Corrective Feedback On Students' Affect In Senior High English Class

Error correction has been one of the core topics in the field of foreign and second language learning and teaching.Numerous studies have focused on the effectiveness of corrective feedback(CF)in classroom settings but only a few have investigated students'affect in oral corrective feedback(OCF).Thus a research was conducted on the efficacy of corrective feedback from the perspective of students' affective needs,aiming to find out to what extent teachers' way of providing corrective feedback is associated with students' attitude,anxiety,self-esteem and motivation,especially students with different English proficiency.With the instruments of questionnaire,interview and classroom observation,the present study investigated 4 English teachers and 357 senior high students from No.1 Middle School of Loudi,Hunan Province,attempting to explore the following three issues:(1)Do the students with different English proficiency have the same attitude toward oral error and error correction in senior high English class?(2)How do the students with different English proficiency emotionally respond to teachers' corrective feedback?(3)Is there emotional discrepancy between high-level students and low-level students in the process of corrective feedback?The study findings revealed that students with different proficiency held a positive attitude toward oral error and error correction,and there existed emotional discrepancy between them in the process of corrective feedback.Firstly,both of the two groups preferred teacher-correction and rejected peer-correction mainly due to the embarrassment factor but the high-level students had a higher motivation to try out self-correction.Besides,the low achievers had a stronger sense of frustration and anxiety than high achievers when the teacher frequently corrected their errors.Likewise,as for the timing of error correction,the poor performers apparently experienced more negative emotion than the high ones,but delayed correction was desired by both groups for its more inhibition of anxiety in comparison with immediate correction.Finally,the strategy of recasts enjoyed the most popularity between students with different English levels in that it caused little damage to students' affect,whereas explicit correction exerted negative effects on students' anxiety and self-esteem to some degree,but the high proficiency students found it more bearable and acceptable.However,significant difference could be found between the two groups in prompting feedback.Good performers had higher risk-taking and stronger self-esteem to receive prompts provided by teachers and they usually gained a sense of achievement,while poor performers strongly rejected it owing to their low-esteem and high anxiety caused by their poor linguistic knowledge.Based on these findings,five suggestions on the theoretical quality of teachers,teaching practices,the participants of error correction,different CF techniques and new emerging modern tools for CF are put forward as references for improving the efficiency of CF techniques in senior English class.