An Investigation On Teachers' And Students' Beliefs In Corrective Feedback In Junior High School English Classroom

In the field of second language classroom interaction,corrective feedback is a hot topic of research.Its essential role in language development has been confirmed by many second language learning theories and empirical studies.At present,most of the studies focus on the effect of corrective feedback methods,while the researches on teachers' and students' corrective feedback beliefs are relatively few.Therefore,by making reference to Lyster and Ranta's classification of corrective feedback and the Errors Analysis Theory,this paper conducts a comparative study on the corrective feedback beliefs of teachers and students in junior high school English classes,aiming to find out the similarities and differences of teachers' and students' corrective feedback beliefs and explore the reasons for them,so as to improve the effectiveness of corrective feedback in junior school English classes.This study is centered on the following three questions:1)What are the teachers' and students' beliefs in corrective feedback in junior high school English classroom? What are the similarities and differences between their beliefs?2)What are the causes contributing to differences between teachers' and students' beliefs in corrective feedback?3)Are teachers' actual behaviors of corrective feedback consistentwith their beliefs? If inconsistent,what are the reasons?The research subjects of this study are 45 teachers and 175 students from a junior high school in Hohhot.By adopting quantitative and qualitative research methods,the study compares the similarities and differences of the teachers' and students' corrective feedback beliefs,analyzes the reasons for the similarities and differences,and also explores whether teachers' actual behaviors of corrective feedback are consistent with their beliefs in corrective feedback.Through the research,some main conclusions have been drawn.Firstly,teachers' and students' beliefs in corrective feedback are as follows.Most English teachers and students believe that it is necessary to correct errors in class.Teachers have a strong belief in correcting students' phonological errors,while students have a strong belief in correcting grammatical errors.Both teachers and students have a strong belief in correcting errors after students' expression.In addition,teachers have a strong faith in peer-correction and self-correction,while students have a strong faith in teacher-correction.What' more,teachers have a strong faith in the method of recasting,while students prefer explicit methods.Secondly,the factors influencing the teachers' beliefs and students' beliefs in providing corrective feedback are students' English proficiency,personalities,and teaching task.Finally,teachers' beliefs and their actual teaching behaviors in providing corrective feedback aremainly consistent in the necessity and the time of corrective feedback,but inconsistent in the types of errors,the subjects of corrective feedback,and the methods of corrective feedback.At last,in order to improve the effectiveness of corrective feedback in junior high school English classes,the author puts forward three teaching implications.Firstly,teachers should guide the students to employ peer-correction and self-correction to improve the students' classroom participation.Secondly,teachers should enrich their knowledge about corrective feedback and put it into the actual classroom teaching.Thirdly,teachers should give full consideration to students' emotional factors when providing corrective feedback.Moreover,this thesis also summarizes the limitations of the present study and puts forward some suggestions for future research.