Study Of Corrective Feedback In Teaching Chinese As A Second Language Classes

Corrective feedback has always been an important topic in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) during the past two decades as an issue that every L2 teacher confronts and one that greatly affects the outcome of L2 learners' study. On the international scale, researches about corrective feedback have made an early start out and achieved fruitfully, while domestically, studies on this subject are still far behind. This research proposes relative suggestions for teachers of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL) classes by analyzing classroom interaction transcriptions and questionnaire investigations taken from several classes in Shanghai Study Center of Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE).Classroom interaction transcription indicates that the teachers involved provide immediate corrective feedbacks to most of the errors. Most feedbacks from teachers are perceived by students. It is also spotted an overwhelming tendency for teachers to use recasts especially in primary level classes in spite of its ineffectiveness at arousing students' attention; teachers of intermediate-advanced level classes tend to use different methods of corrective feedback in a more balanced way. Dealing with different types of errors, teachers don't put enough efforts in correcting phonetic errors, which occurs most; when dealing with grammatical errors, teachers over rely on recasts, which is inefficient. During different sequences of TCSL class, most corrective feedbacks occur in construing and language drilling, which are low in authenticity of communication.Questionnaire investigation indicates that there are differences between teachers and students in corrective feedback usage. Students in intermediate-advanced level tend to be in a higher anxiety. Recast can reduce students' anxiety level in a significant way, while metalinguistic feedback and, elicitation and explicit correction lead to higher anxiety level. Gender difference has no obvious affect on students' anxiety level in Chinese class.According to the above analysis, this article proposes the following suggestions for TCSL teachers that we had better to attach great importance to correcting phonetic errors using a combined way of recast, explanation and demonstration; explicitly correct grammatical errors in a proper way with illustration; use different corrective feedbacks in order to encourage students to pay more attention to their language forms; correct students' errors according to error type and student's personalities, rather than gender; keep correcting essential errors in intermediate-advanced level class to avoid the "fossilization" of those errors.There are two innovations in this article:1. This article using the aspects of error types and class sequences to analyze thecurrent situation of corrective feedback in TCSL class.2. This article carries out a primary analysis in the relation between corrective feedbacks types and students' anxiety level.