An Empirical Study On Senior High School EFL Teachers’ Oral Error Correction And Students’ Correction Needs

The process of acquiring a second language is like the process of learning the mother language;errors will inevitably occur,but it is in the process of correcting language errors that learners can learn and master the language better.Error correction is an important mechanism for second language acquisition and also is one of the common teaching methods used by teachers in the classroom.Whether teachers can effectively correct students’ errors in the classroom will largely affect the quality and effectiveness of students’ foreign language learning.In order to achieve higher efficiency and quality of classroom error correction,teachers should not only master the appropriate strategies of error correction,but also consider students’ needs and preferences for classroom error correction.This thesis adopts a combination of quantitative research and qualitative research to investigate the discrepancies between teachers’ strategies of error correction and students’ needs for error correction in high school English classrooms.320 students of Grade 8 and 62 EFL teachers from two senior high schools in Zhuji,Zhejiang Province are investigated by questionnaire,classroom observation and interview,through which the author can obtain the research data and analysis,so as to summarize the major findings of the study,and find out the discrepancies between teachers’ strategies of error correction and students’ needs for error correction and the reasons for these discrepancies.Based on the data and records obtained,the conclusion of this study can be summarized from the following five aspects.(1)Both teachers and students hold positive attitude towards classroom error correction,believing that it is necessary and helpful to improve students’ English language level.However,on the question of whether classroom error correction will have a negative impact on students’ mentality,teachers believe that classroom error correction will easily cause students’ nervousness or other problems,but students believe that regular classroom error correction will not affect their psychological well-being or motivation to English learning.The majority of teachers and students agree on the issue of “too much error correction in the classroom tends to make students anxious”.(2)In terms of what kinds of errors to be corrected in class,teachers do not think it is needful to point out all errors in class because of the finite time and energy,but students do;both teachers and students agree that grammatical errors and lexical errors should be the most frequently corrected errors,followed by pragmatic errors and phonetic errors.(3)With regard to the choice on the time of error correction,both teachers and students agree that error correction should be at the end of students’ expression.The reason is that immediate error correction tends to make students nervous and affect the fluency of expression,etc.;while correcting errors at the end of the activity or after the class,both teachers and students tend to forget the content of errors;correcting errors after the expression can not only ensure the integrity of students’ expression,but also is an act of respect for students.(4)As for the question of who should be the main subject of error correction,most teachers and students choose teachers as the main subject of error correction in class.Teachers are influenced by the limited teaching time to choose themselves as the main subject of classroom error correction,while students more trust the teacher’s professionalism.However,students also want more opportunities for self-correction,while teachers prefer peer-correction,because teachers believe that peer-correction can draw more students’ attention.(5)Most teachers and students choose to take explicit feedback to correct phonetic and lexical errors and to take formal negotiation to correct grammatical errors;while for pragmatic errors,most teachers choose to adopt formal negotiation,while most students want teachers to take explicit feedback to correct errors,because students think it needs a lot of language knowledge to master pragmatic expression well,so even if teachers take formal negotiation,students think they still can’t deal with pragmatic errors appropriately.Through classroom error correction,teachers actually use recasts mostly;but students want teachers to take more explicit correction,because students think that sometimes they can’t realize that the teacher is correcting their errors through recasts,but the explicit correction makes them know the errors directly.Overall,most of the teachers’ error correction strategies meet the students’ needs for classroom error correction.Based on the above summaries,the author gives some suggestions about classroom error correction in order to provide English teachers with some insights on error correction.1.Teachers ought to make reasonable use of the timing of classroom error correction.2.Teachers ought to treat “error” and“mistake”properly in classes.3.Teachers should consider error correction on the basis of teaching purposes.4.Teachers should respect students’ dominant position in the classroom.5.The methods of error correction adopted by teachers should be different from person to person.6.Teachers should pay attention to their attitude and maintain students’ “face”.At the same time,the author also points out the limitations of this research and how to improve the quality of the future research.