A Comparative Study Of The Attitudes Of Different-Level Senior High School Students Towards Oral Error Correction In English Classroom

Corrective feedback is not only an evaluation measure but a factor influencing students’ interlanguage.In the student-centered education background,it would appear helpful for teachers to find out students’ attitudes then provide corrective feedback more properly.Now there are still deficiencies in the researches of students’ attitudes to error correction in senior high school;students’ different levels are also not fully considered.Therefore,the author selects 150 senior high school students from Nanning NO.26 Middle School as the research subjects,and the Interaction Hypothesis and Fossilization as the theoretical basis,attempting to answer the following two questions by questionnaire and interview:(1)What are the different-level senior high school students’ attitudes towards oral error correction(whether,when,what,how and who)in English classroom?(2)What are the similarities and differences in different-level senior high school students’ attitudes towards oral error correction(whether,when,what,how and who)in English classroom?The major findings are as follows:(1)As for different-level students’ attitudes,high-level students hold positive attitudes to error correction;they agree with selective correction but deny overcorrection.Low-level students favor error correction.They also favor selective correction but dislike excessive correction.About what to correct,high-level students’ priority list is lexical and grammatical errors.Low-level students favor that lexical and grammatical errors should receive more attention.About when to correct,high-level students rank correction after finishing speaking first.Low-level students are willing to receive corrective feedback after the activities.About who to correct,high-level students favor self-correction.Low-level students favor teacher correction.About how to correct,high-level students choose recast and metalinguistic feedback.Low-level students choose recast and explicit correction.(2)As for the similarities and differences,although students at both levels agree on the necessity of error correction,support selective correction,and reject overcorrection,their attitudes are distinct concerning what,when,who and how to correct.Students at both levels pay attention to lexical errors but ignore phonetic errors.More high-level students believe grammatical and expressive errors should be corrected.Different-level students disfavor immediate correction but agree with delayed correction.The difference is the timing of delay: high-level students choose correction after finishing speaking,while low-level students choose correction at the end of the activities.Teacher correction is agreed upon by students at different levels but peer correction owns less support.The attitudes to self-correction vary,with self-correction receiving more support from high-level students.The attitudes towards recast,clarification request,elicitation,and repetition are consistent across levels of students.The difference is that metalinguistic feedback is supported by more high-level students and explicit correction is supported by more low-level students.According to the above findings,it is suggested that students could try peer correction,increase sensitivity to errors,and pay more attention to phonetic errors.Teachers should create a relaxing classroom atmosphere,take different-level students’ attitudes to error correction into consideration and teach accordingly.