Corrective Feedback In Classrooms Of Teaching Chinese As A Second Language

Corrective feedback, also known as error correction, is thought important not only by researchers of L2 acquisition, but also by teachers in L2 classrooms. It has received a lot of attention from the circle of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), but is almost an untouched topic in the circle of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL). This paper presents a study of corrective feedback and learner uptake in ten TCSL classrooms at the beginners' and intermediate levels. Transcripts totaling 1000 minutes of classroom interaction are taken from ten speaking and integrated classes. The findings indicate that the teachers tend to give immediate feedbacks to most of the errors, and show no significant differences between the beginners' and intermediate classes. Compared with some previous studies in communicative classrooms, this study finds more corrective feedbacks, more uptakes and more repairs, but less "real" interactions in the ten TCSL classrooms.