The Effect Of Recasting And Metalinguistic Feedback In English Teachers',Oral Corrective Feedback On Students' Acquisition Of Subject-predicate Agreement

With the development of the notion of education,more and more people have come to realize that we should regard students instead of teachers as the center in teaching practice.Therefore,the teaching environment has gradually become the research focus at home and abroad.The success of classroom teaching is affected by many factors and teacher-student interaction is an important one of them.However,the current domestic teacher-student interaction in the classroom teaching is far from perfect.Compared with that in other subjects,English teachers' classroom discourse has its particularity.The quality of English teachers' discourse not only restricts the teaching effectiveness,but also affects learners' abilities in many aspects.These factors put higher requirements for the quality and quantity of L2 teachers classroom discourse.Class feedback is one of the important components of teacher discourse and the teachers' corrective feedback plays an important role as a key form of the interaction between teachers and students;therefore,the corrective feedback has attracted more and more attention of domestic and foreign scholars of applied linguistics.According to the different degrees of clarity and operation modes,we can divide corrective feedback into many specific forms.By synthesizing the existing researches,the author has found that previous researches have mainly focused on the study of recasts and have paid less attention to other forms and the existing empirical researches have almost all focused on the relationship between the students'acquisition of the past tense,the third person singular and the teachers'corrective feedback.Other grammatical items are involved very little.The subject-predicate agreement is a complex phenomenon in the English language and also an important and difficult pcoint for Chinese students.This is fundamental grammar knowledge but the students often meet difficulty in the acquisition of it.Therefore,this study took students in Grade Three of Qin Zhi High School in Xingyi,Guizhou Province as the subjects,and the subject-predicate agreement as the target grammar item.This study aimed to investigate the relationship between students' acquisition effect of the subject-predicate agreement and recasting and metalinguistic feedback.Specifically,three research questions were put forward in the present study.1)Do the recasting and metalinguistic feedback have a significant effect on the students' acquisition of subject-predicate agreement?2)Is there any difference in the effectiveness between the two feedback forms?3)What are students' and teachers' attitudes toward oral corrective feedback?This study included a pretest,six:rounds of training activities,an immediate post-test,student questionnaire and teacher interview.All the collected data were analyzed with SPSS 13.0 and the main findings are as follows.First,recasting and metalinguistic feedback can effectively promote the students' acquisition of the target grammatical item.Second,there is no obvious difference in the effect of acquisition between the two forms of teachers'corrective feedback.Third,the study on the attitudes of the students and the teachers showed that most students hold a positive attitude towards teachers' oral corrective feedback,but there are still some students who cannot take part in teacher-student interaction very well.Interviews with teachers showed that teachers can pay enough attention to oral corrective feedback and adopt various ways in giving feedback.The results of this study have certain referential significance for English teachers while teaching.