An Analysis Of Students' Oral English Errors And Teachers' Error Correction Strategies Of Junior Middle Schools

Language learning is a process in which learners make errors and correct them and finally form a proper target language system.Therefore,errors are inevitable in the learning process.Corder,the pioneer of EA(Error Analysis),said in his book The Significance of Learners' Errors that L2 errors are interesting because they can reflect some of the underlying linguistic rules,which indicates the importance of learners' errors and changes the obsolete view of errors that error should be corrected when it occurs.Hence,it is really important for the EFL teachers and researchers to study and analyze learners' errors upon the EA theory.This paper focuses on the following four questions:1)What kinds of oral errors do the junior middle school students make frequently in English class?2)What are the main reasons for the oral errors which junior middle school students often make in English class?3)What kinds of effective error-correction strategies do junior middle school students prefer?4)How to use these error-correction strategies to improve students' oral ability in English class?The author carried out an experiment about implementing the error correction strategies on oral English teaching.The research was conducted in Feixi Liang Gang middle school.During the first period of the experiment,the author chose two classes to be the participants.One is the experimental class(EC),and the other is the controlled class(CC).The students from the two classes are required to have a pre-test of their oral English.After analyzing the data of the pre-test,the author found out the students' oral errors can be typically classified into the following: lexical errors;phonetic errors;grammatical errors and pragmatic errors.Moreover,the main sources of the errors which students made in their oral English are intralingual transfer;interlingual transfer;cultural gap and insufficient language input.After analyzing the data of the questionnaire and the interview,the author found that the most popular correction strategies for the junior middle students are: explicit correction;metalinguistic clues;recasts and elicitation.These four strategies were carried out in the EC for four months.At last,the author gave a post-test to the EC and the CC.The findings revealed that the scores of EC are better than those of the CC and the oral ability of the EC students were remarkably improved.