A Study Of Corrective Feedback In Senior High School English Classrooms

This paper aims to study the error correction in high school English class.Errors are inevitable in the process of learners' second language acquisition.And linguists believe that making errors is not a bad thing and to a certain extent,studying errors can promote foreign language learning.Teachers should also pay attention to students' errors in order to help students master English.So,teachers' treatment to students' errors is also important for analyzing errors.The study tries to investigate the following three questions:1)What kinds of errors do high school students make most frequently in English class?What is the distribution of teachers'corrective feedback following different types of errors?2)What are the similarities and differences between students' and teachers' attitude towards error correction in class?3)What are the similarities and differences between students'preferences and teachers,treatment on the timing,subject and methods of errors to be corrected in class?In this research,245 students from senior grade one and 30 teachers from Taoyuan No.1 Middle School have been selected as the research subjects.The experiment lasted for three months.Two questionnaires,two interviews and classroom observation of 12 classes by the 30 teachers were carried out.The findings are as follows:1)From the classroom observation,it can be seen that students make phonological errors most frequently.As for teachers,they won't correct all students' errors for time is limited.They pay more attention to those errors related to language points,such as grammatical and lexical errors.2)Students and teachers are much the same in their attitudes to error correction,but still some significant differences can be found.Both students and teachers regard error correction as necessary and helpful to English learning.Students want teachers to correct all their errors while teachers are concerned more the mental stress brought about by the correction.3)The students' needs for error correction are satisfied in timing and subject but not in methods of correction.In timing of error correction,both teachers and students think it would be better to correct errors at the end of students' speech.As for subject of correction,most teachers and students hold the same view that it is more authoritative and effective if teachers as the subject of error correction.In methods of correction,students hope that teachers will use more Explicit Correction while teachers use Recast most frequently.The author hopes the study can help teachers understand the expectation of students' corrective feedback and know when and how to correct students' errors.