An Investigation On Error Correction In English Classroom At Junior High School

Making errors is inevitable in the process of second language acquisition.It is a natural phenomenon that learners make errors in different stages of language learning process.The classroom is the main place for Chinese students to learn the foreign language.Therefore,the effectiveness of teachers' classroom error correction is directly related to the quality of students' language learning.This study is to investigate error correction in the junior high school English class.Questionnaire,observation and interview are adopted in this study to find out how the English teachers correct students' different errors in class.By analyzing the research data,it is found that both teachers and students agree that making errors is inevitable and error correction is significant.In most cases,teachers focus on lexical,grammatical and phonetic errors in class while many students hope their phonetic errors can be ignored.About the timing of correction,most teachers and students think phonetic errors should be corrected immediately,and lexical,grammatical and pragmatic errors should be corrected immediately or after the student gives his/her ideas.About the choice of corrector,phonetic and pragmatic errors are often corrected by teachers,and group-correction and whole class correction are used in correcting lexical and grammatical errors.Students believe teacher-correction is the most efficient one while self-correction and group-correction and whole class correction are more meaningful.About how to correct errors,explicit correction and paralinguistic signal are used in correcting phonetic errors,and students prefer the latter.Teachers use explicit correction and repetition to correct lexical errors,and students prefer repetition.Teachers and students believe repetition and clarification request can be used in correcting grammatical errors.As for correcting pragmatic errors,the English teachers pay little attention on correcting them most of the time,and they sometimes use mother-tongue to correct pragmatic errors.According to the findings above,specific suggestions on error correction are given to the junior high school English teachers.Also,the limitations of this thesis are analyzed,and recommendations for the future research are provided.