A Study On The Strategies Of Error Correction In Oral English Teaching Of Higher Vocational College

Most of vocational students have a poor background in English, oral errors are unavoidable. The effective use of oral error correction can not only promote students'oral language proficiency, but also protect students'self-esteem, self-confidence and motivation in study. Eight error correction strategies will be tested here on whether they can decrease oral errors and improve oral language proficiency of vocational students.The study takes the freshmen of two classes in Liao Chemical & Petroleum University as the subjects to make a deep research on the effectiveness of some error correction strategies. One is the experimental class, and the other is control class. The study has experienced 16 weeks. During the study of oral language teaching, two oral tests are conducted:one is pre-test at the beginning of the semester, the other is post-test in the end. In addition, teachers use different error correction strategies based on error correction theory to do research and to make an analysis centering on three questions in order to get a conclusion, and meanwhile natural observation, questionnaire and interview are used. While in control class, traditional oral English teaching is still remained.The three research questions are:â‘ What are the causes for oral language errors of vocational students?â‘¡Are the error correction strategies effective in oral language teaching?â‘¢Among all the error correction strategies adopted in the study, explicit correction, recast, clarification, metalinguistic clues, elicitation, repetition, peer correction and interruption, which is more effective?The result of the research shows that the use of error correction strategies has a positive effect on improving oral language proficiency of vocational students. By making a contrastive analysis on the data both from pre-test and post-test, students' oral errors in experimental class have decreased by using error correction strategies for a semester; the error rates in different language levels, such as lexicon, syntax and pragmatics, have decreased obviously. The questionnaire result shows that vocational students hold positive attitude towards oral errors and error correction. Also it is showed by the interview that, most students think error correction strategies have improved their oral language proficiency.The main findings of the research are:â‘ most students hold an active attitude towards error correction in oral English, while too many error corrections are not favored by them;â‘¡peer correction is liked very much, especially students like peers to correct their pronunciations.In final conclusion, the implications of the research are proposed to vocational oral language teaching, an analysis on the weakness of the research is given, and suggestions for the future study are put forward.