Corrective Feedback And Learner Uptake: The Case Of EFL Middle School Classrooms

Research on classroom SLA shows that teacher-student interaction provides the best opportunities for the learners to exercise target language skills, to test out their hypotheses about the target language, and to get useful feedback. So studies of L2 classroom interaction began to attract much attention in SLA studies since 1980s. The aspect of interaction in classrooms with the widest scope is probably that generally referred to as feedback, which includes the notion of error correction. Feedback in L2 classrooms lies at the core of research on teacher-student and student-student interaction in L2 classrooms. This study explores teachers' corrective feedback, an important aspect of teachers' feedback, and its relationship with students' uptake. Two research questions, which were replicated from Lyster (1998), were addressed in this study: 1) What types of learner errors lead to what types of corrective feedback? 2) What types of corrective feedback lead to the immediate repair of what types of learner errors?The database is drawn from transcripts of audio-recordings of 18 English as foreign language lessons by six teachers with each giving 3 lessons, totaling 15.2 hours. The following are the major findings of the present study:1. Grammatical errors are by far the most frequent ones among all errors made by learners and thus the treatment on them are more frequent than those on other types of errors.2. Teachers tended to recast grammatical and phonological errors and negotiate lexical errors.3. Phonological repairs tended to follow recasts and the negotiation of form, whereas grammatical repairs and lexical repairs tended to follow the negotiation of form.Some implications can be drawn based on the findings for classroom applications; among themare:1. Teachers can use the negotiation of form to encourage students' self or peer correction in the provision of feedback when the errors are simple grammatical ones, because almost two-thirds of all grammatical repairs resulted from this type of feedback. Besides, the learners are capable of correcting themselves if they are given sufficient time and their attention is called upon to the form.2. Teachers were on the right track in their decisions to recast phonological errors and negotiate lexical errors, both can bring high repair rate.3. Teachers should conduct more activities which aim at fluency and communication, in which the learners may have more opportunities to speak in the target language and also have more chances to commit errors which inform teachers of their learning stage and help them diagnose learning difficulties.The thesis is composed of the following chapters: Chapter one first introduces the need for the study and provides an overview about the thesis; then it goes on to review some relevant theories and models in SLA and some of the studies that are relevant to the present study over the past two decades. Chapter Two consists of the following parts: (1). Description of research procedures and clarification of some of the terms. (2). Data collection and data analysis. Chapter Three presents the discussions of the results and answers to the research questions. Chapter Four presents the findings of the study and its implications for teaching. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for further study are also provided.