| It is a common phenomenon that students make errors in the foreign-language classroom.Therefore,applied linguists at home and abroad have always placed great emphasis on how language teachers should treat students’ errors.The research on corrective feedback abroad dated from 1950 s and the field covers its necessity,time,strategy,etc.However,in China,the research in this area started late and there have been few empirical studies on teachers’ and students’ attitude towards corrective feedback and error correction methods in junior high schools.This study aims at learning more about their attitude toward oral corrective feedback(OCF)and the effectiveness of OCF on grammar learning,with the junior high school students as the main research objects.This study was conducted in a common junior high school in Shenzhen,and the participants were all from Class One and Two in Grade Eight,including their English teacher,seventy-two persons in total.With questionnaire,teacher’s interview,classroom observation and pretest,post test as well as delayed post test as research instruments and the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs as the target grammar,the writer intended to find out the results of these two questions: 1.What are students’ and their English teacher’s attitudes and preferences towards OCF in junior high schools? 2.Which type of corrective feedback,explicit correction or recast,is more effective for students to get improved in grammar learning?This dissertation is composed of the following five parts: the first part is introduction,mainly introducing the research background and significance.The second part is literature review,it mainly introduces the definition of corrective feedback,the classification of OCF,theoretical and empirical studies about the attitude,preference,time,strategy and effectiveness of OCF written by scholars at home and abroad.The third part is methodology,the research questions,participants and instruments are described in this part.In the fourth part,after analyzing the data collected from the research instruments,the results of the questionnaire,interview,classroom observation and three oral tests are shown and discussed.The last part is conclusion,it introduces the major findings,pedagogical implication,limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.Through the data analysis,the research results are as follows: 1.Both the teacher and over eighty percent of students in this junior high school think highly of OCF and regard it as a useful step to result in learner uptake.2.Junior school students look forward to getting any grammatical errors corrected by teacher in classes,but their teacher tends to only correct those are related to the target grammar.3.Students confidently think themselves won’t repeat the grammatical mistakes after being corrected by teachers while their English teacher totally disagrees with that opinion.4.In the process of grammar learning,junior students prefer recast while their English teacher prefers explicit correction.5.Compared with recast,explicit correction is more helpful to grammar learning.Based on the major findings,teachers should treat students’ language errors correctly and give them proper OCF.Meanwhile,teachers are supposed to pay attention to students’ preference of OCF and strengthen their study of theory about OCF,combining different OCF types to correct students when teaching grammar so as to improve their English in an effective way. |
