An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Teacher’s Corrective Feedback And College Students’ Oral English Accuracy

In language teaching, the meaning-focused teaching approach that is communicative language teaching makes students can speak fluently while ignoring the language accuracy, and their outputs are not in agreement with grammatical rules. Therefore, this study suggests providing students with corrective feedback which can give students opportunities to notice the mismatch between their interlanguage system and the target language forms, and aims to test if the corrective feedback can improve students’ oral English accuracy. The research questions are:(1) Through teaching experiment, are there any differences between the experiment group(EG) which receives teacher’s corrective feedback and the control group(CG)without teacher’s corrective feedback? If there are, what are the reasons for them?(2) What are the main grammar errors in college students’ oral English?The study was done in Jincheng College with 60 students who were from two classes and divided into EG and CG. The experiment lasted a whole semester and five classes were recorded. To test the efficacy of corrective feedback in improving students’ oral English accuracy, the study made comparisons between the two groups after the experiment. And according to the analysis of the results and interviews, the research has shown that:(1) The statistics show that the two classes have improved the oral accuracy and after the experiment, there appeared significant differences in terms of oral English accuracy between EG and CG, and students in EG outperformed students in CG on a whole. The results show the efficacy of teacher’s corrective feedback. And the results of the interviews have shown students actively corrected the grammar errors when they were preparing and consciously corrected the grammar errors when they spoke English.(2) The grammar errors committed in students’ oral English are classified into different types: errors in S-P agreement; double or missing use of predicate; tense errors; misuse of predicate; errors in non-finite verb forms; voice errors; errors in gerund or infinitive as subjects; numeral errors of nouns; article errors; misuse of pronouns; errors in prepositions; misuse of parts of speech; errors in conjunctions. In students’ oral English, errors in S-P agreement and numeral errors of nouns are committed frequently. These errors reflect students’ failures in language performance and problems in language competence.According to the results, the researcher puts forward some implicitions on English curriculum and English teaching. Although there are some limitations in the study, the research results indicate that to some extent corrective feedback is significant in oral English teaching and provides new ideas for studies on corrective feedback.