A Case Study On Adoption Of Error Correction Techniques In English Classroom Oral Activities In Senior Middle School

Many foreign language researchers have been being devoted to studying how teachers correct students oral errors in their oral activities. However, it can't be exactly concluded for teachers how to effectively adopt oral error correction techniques in students oral activities in senior middle school. Though nowadays English researchers encourage teachers to pay more attention to oral error correction techniques in students oral activities, many problems still exist in the real situations, especially in some remote rural areas, teachers still adopt traditional oral correction techniques so that some students lose confidence in English oral activities. Therefore, the author thinks still there is necessity to study this problem.This article begins by synthesizing findings from observational classroom research on corrective feedback and then presents an observational study of patterns of error treatment and the recording of the error treatment of classroom oral activities, which are based on seven teachers and 57 students of two classes in senior I in Huhhot Vocational College. The study examines the different oral error correction techniques used by the teachers and which of the techniques is the learners'preference. Based on the results and discussion, the following conclusion has been made:1. While the students are practicing in their oral activities,don't expect there are none of the mistakes in the students oral activities,allow students to make mistakes. The teachers should adopt encouraging, tactful,gentle and supportive correction; a good deal of teacher sensitivity is needed here.2. The students prefer teachers to adopt Recasts, Pinpointing, Elicitation, Waiting, and Metalinguistic feedback to give them correction , they don't like Explicit correction, so that they have no confidence to do oral activities.3. Oral correction should be paid more attention to techniques and occasions. Students don't like teachers to do Explicit correction, nor peer-correction. They prefer teachers to lead them to do self-correction.Therefore, teachers shouldn't put undue stress on the students oral errors so that they lose heart in English oral practice(Brown & Yule, 2000). Teachers'oral correction must be skillfully and reasonably adopted because whether teachers adopt the proper error correction techniques will directly influence teaching efficiency and students'learning enthusiasm. Teachers should'tolerant'students oral errors,lead them to find their errors by themselves,and let them do self-correction with proper way, so that they can improve their oral abilities in their practice.