Orally Explicit Feedback

In EFL situation, college English teaching has long been criticized for being "time consuming and low efficient". Yet, in the case of writing, the problem is not only concerned with efficiency, but also with the long-lasting poor performance on the students' part. The nodus of poor writing performance is the composition correction. Teachers have taken great pains to correct students' compositions in person or apply new correction methods to it. However, contrary to teachers' expectations, their efforts have proved to be of little avail. Students keep on making the same errors as they have committed before over and again. It is because students don't get the formal grammar instruction any more. Thus their grammar consciousness gradually fades away; some grammatical points are even forgotten. There are, currently, four types of composition correction methods Classified by the people who perform corrective action: teacher-correction, self-correction, peer-readings and in-class correction. Nevertheless, their outcomes are controversial and unsatisfactory. At present, there is another correction method prevailing in the western country: Conferencing. This method analyses learners' individual problems and offers explicit spoken feedback. It is widely used in writing courses in English speaking countries and English majors in non-English speaking countries. But since it consumes much class time and is usually controlled by a teacher assistant, it cannot be broadly used among non-English majors. Nevertheless, as one of its most outstanding merits, Orally Explicit Feedback is more personal and impressive than written feedback. In this paper, the author proves correction of this theory by a questionnaire and doing teaching experiment in composition correction. The outcome of the questionnaire indicates that the current college freshmen's grammar proficiency requires further studying while the result shows that the subjects in experimental class committed significantly fewer errors man those in controlled class. Thus, the author suggests applying orally explicit feedback in composition correction. For one thing, it can raise students' grammar consciousness; for another, teachers can be liberated from the arduous work of composition correction.