A Comparative Study Into Corrective Feedback Between Student Teachers And Experienced Teachers

Corrective feedback (CF) is an indispensable part of classroom interaction and the core of SLA researches as well. Effective corrective feedback provides learners with more opportunities to notice distinctions between target language and interlanguage, leads to more turns of interaction which is conducive to their interlanguage. Teachers are feedback givers, how they give CF will greatly influence learner uptake. Therefore,the thesis raises 2 research questions: 1) Are there similarities and differences in the cognition of CF between student teachers and experienced teachers? 2) Are there similarities and differences in the quantity and detailed distribution of CF, and what are possible causes of the differences?The present study, drawn from database of 8 English classes by two teacher types in a junior high school in Nanjing, with each giving one class, compares their cognition of CF, frequency and distribution of different CF types by using questionnaire, video-taping & transcribing, and post-interviews. The findings reveal that: 1) experienced teachers (ETs) are more student-centered when considering corrective feedback and have higher consistency with practice; 2) student teachers are sensitive to salient errors and tend to give implicit CF while experienced teachers prefer explicit CF; 3) prompts are proved the most effective CF type in general as it was in other researches especially elicitation, and recasts are highly expected for imperceptible and accumulative influence on students.The findings imply that 1) student teachers should be more student-centered and be less controllable to classes; 2) student teachers should improve their sensibility to grammar, be aware of the roles of grammar and learn skills of teaching pronunciation;3) all teachers are expected to know more techniques of giving recasts; 4) experienced teachers should be equipped with more advanced theories for professional development.