A Comparative Survey On Teachers And Students' Beliefs Of Corrective Feedback In College English Classroom

At present,more and more researchers and teachers begin to attach importance to the role of corrective feedback in English classroom.Most of the researches are based on the theoretical study of corrective feedback.Most of the subjects are middle and high school classrooms,but there are few researches on oral English correction in college English classes.This paper investigates the beliefs of English teachers and students in five universities in Guilin,and compares the attitudes and preferences of teachers and students on corrective feedback.Finally,underlying causes are analyzed.In this study,the Lyster and Ranta's classification of CF,Chaundron's five questions and affective filter hypothesis of Krashen are the theoretical basis in this paper.The dimensions of the questionnaire are based on Chaundron's five questions:1)Should learner errors be corrected?2)Which learner errors should be corrected?3)When should learner errors be corrected?4)Who should correct learner errors?5)How should learner errors be corrected?Three hundreds of participants come from 5 different universities in Guilin(Lijiang College of Guangxi Normal University,Guilin University of Technology,Guilin University of Electronic Technology and Guilin Medical University): 150 college teachers and 150 non-English major students.The questionnaire also refers to others which made by Hu Yuezhu(2005)and Xie Bin(2008)in his thesis.The following three questions are discussed:(1)What are beliefs of college English teachers in corrective feedback in college English class?(2)What are students' beliefs regarding CF in college English class?(3)What are the similarities and differences between teachers' and students' CF beliefs?This study mainly uses two kinds of investigation methods(questionnaire and interview)to collect relevant data and information.The general situation of CF belief between teachers and students is explored.I find that teachers and students are consistent in their beliefs about the importance of error correction,the type of correction errors and the timing of error correction.For the importance of error correction,the teacher's CF belief and students' CF belief are highly consistent.Pronunciation and expression errors have become the main types to correct in both beliefs.In the time of error correction,teachers are relatively more in favor of upon competition of expression.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:a.There is consistency and inconsistency between teachers and students in their belief in error correction feedback.Teachers and students are consistent with their beliefs about the importance of correcting errors and correcting time.Teachers and students agree that error correction is a very necessary link in the classroom.Error correction is very helpful to communicate more fluently.In the error correction time,the most unsupported by teachers and students is the immediate correction,and the most support is upon completion of expression.b.The remaining two dimensions in five dimensions,that is,error correction errors type,error correction subject and error correction method are inconsistent.Pronunciation and grammatical errors become the type of error that teachers and students think require more error correction,while students pay more attention to correcting grammatical errors.On the subject of error correction,peer-correction is more popular with students.Students want teachers to give more opportunities for self-correction and peer-correction.In the way of correcting errors,teachers are more supportive of recast and explicit correction,but the students hold the opposite opinion.The repetition which is not supported by teachers is more popular with students.The significance of this study lies in providing some pedagogical implication for English teaching: First of all,teachers' theoretical understanding of CF of corrective feedback should be improved.Second,in the classroom,oral error correction should be combined with written error correction to meet students ' needs for grammar and lexical error correction.Third,teachers should encourage students to self-correction and peer-correction,which improve students' classroom participation.When teachers correct errors in the classroom,the error correction strategy should be selected from the aspects of theory,practice and emotion and combined with the needs of students.