The Effect And Application Of Corrective Feedback In Oral English Class In A Senior High School

As an extremely important part of second language acquisition,English oral corrective feedback has been a widely controversial topic since 1960s.The attitudes of teachers and students towards corrective feedback are also highly valued.As a matter of fact,many scholars abroad and in China have conducted researches on this issue.However,most of the researches focus on the requirements of college students,and only a few studies target high school students.But in China,English is a second language for the majority of the students,and it will take a lot of time and energy to learn it well.And the three years in senior high school are a crucial period for students to lay a good foundation for further learning.Therefore,the error corrective feedback in senior high school classrooms should also receive enough,and even more attention and research.In the light of Error Analysis Theory,Interaction Hypothesis and Contrastive Analysis Theory and on the basis of the framework of five questions put forward by Chaudron,this study is conducted to explore the current application of oral error corrective feedback in high school English classrooms,compare the attitudes of teachers and students to correct feedback,analyze the main factors affecting the effectiveness of error corrective feedback,and then provide the pedagogic implications for the education authorities,English teachers and even for students in future English class in order to improve the effectiveness of error correction feedback,and thus improve students' oral English.This study takes a senior high school in Haidian District,Beijing as an example.In the two-month study,data are collected through classroom observation,student' questionnaires,and semi-structured interviews with students and teachers.And then these data are organized and analyzed.The data display that in today's senior high school English classes,English teachers generally correct the students'oral errors,and sometimes encourage students to correct their own mistakes or ask other students to do peer-correction.These errors can be summarized as phonological errors,lexical errors,grammatical errors,and pragmatic errors.In comparison,the lexical errors are corrected more often while pragmatic errors aroused less attention from teachers.The types of corrective feedback include explicit correction,recast,repetition,clarification request,elicitation and metalinguistic clue,among which explicit correction and recast are used more often by the teachers.In terms of teachers' and students' attitudes towards corrective feedback,questionnaire data and interview records show that there are certain differences.First of all,both teachers and students think oral corrective feedback is necessary and useful to language learning.However,most students expect teachers to correct all of their oral errors whenever they occur in class,but teachers disagree.They prefer to correct the errors selectively and think only those which often occur and impair the communication should be corrected.Next,when asked what kinds of errors should be corrected,both teachers and students think that the four categories of errors should be corrected.From students' perspectives,lexical and grammatical errors are considered as the ones that need to be corrected for the first place,while teachers prioritize pragmatic errors and phonological errors.As for the occasion of error correction,both teachers and students prefer the correction in class rather than after class.But teachers would like to correct the errors after students'presentation because they are afraid to interrupt the students' thinking.And various students accept diverse time of correction—some prefer to be corrected after presentation,others prefer it immediately.When it comes to the strategies of corrective feedback,teachers would like to choose metalinguistic clue,but they use it rarely in actual teaching.And students require various types.With regard to the opinions on the participants of correction,they agree that it is teacher who should correct students' errors.But teachers also suggest peer-correction as well as self-correction.Apparently,the effectiveness of corrective feedback is not always ensured,and it can be influenced by the enormous pressure under all kinds of tests,especially the College Entrance Examination,the limited time in class and disparate opinions between teachers and students.At last,several implications for the education authorities,teachers and students are drawn,which may be applicable to the senior school English classes.For education authorities,it is necessary to build a sophisticated oral test system,and all English tests should include both written and oral parts to make students and teachers attach great importance to spoken English.For teachers,they should give weight to students' spoken English and try their best to meet students' requirements for a combination of various corrective feedback strategies.For students,it is essential to response after receiving correction and pay more attention to the development of their communicative ability,but not just learn for tests.