A Comparative Study Of Teachers' And Students' Attitudes Towards Oral Corrective Feedback In EFL Classroom Of Junior High Schools

It is important for English teachers to know how to deal with students? spoken errors during the teaching process,but one of the most discouraging experiences of teachers is correcting errors,especially those that recur in their students? production(Lasagabaster & Sierra,2005).A possible explanation for these experiences might be the mismatch between teachers? and students? beliefs about effective feedback on error correction(Roothooft & Breeze,2016).Oral corrective feedback is a typical feature of most English classes,and researchers have tended to focus on the cognitive and theoretical aspects of oral corrective feedback in recent years.In comparison with the amount of research on the effectiveness of corrective feedback,relatively few studies have investigated teachers? and students? attitudes towards oral corrective feedback in China.Previous studies have also neglected to investigate how junior high school students prefer to be corrected.Therefore,it is of great significance to investigate teachers? and students? perceptions about oral corrective feedback in the classroom.Under this background,this study aimed to investigate teachers? and students? attitudes towards oral corrective feedback in junior high schools.To achieve the purpose,four research questions were designed: 1)What are the students? and teachers? overall beliefs towards oral corrective feedback in EFL classroom of junior high schools,and how well do they correspond? 2)What are the students? and teachers? attitudes towards the oral CF timing,the types of oral errors,the way of giving oral CF and the question of who should do correction in EFL classroom of junior high schools? 3)How do the students feel when they receive oral CF and what are the expectations to teachers? feedback in EFL classroom of junior high schools? 4)What are the teachers? major concerns about providing oral CF in EFL classroom of junior high schools?Both quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted in the research.The quantitative research included a student questionnaire and a teacher questionnaire,the questionnaire items were adapted from instruments used in previous studies.Totally 156 students and 73 English teachers from high schools participated in this study.Apart from questionnaire survey,6 teachers and 6 students were chosen to be interviewed.The major findings of the study have shown that: 1)Both students and teachers agreed that oral CF was useful in the English learning process,but the students expressed their expectations for more oral corrective feedback from their teachers.The most significant discrepancy was in relation to the disagreement about how much oral CF should be given;2)In terms of the types of oral errors,the order of their perceptions were the same,that was: lexical > grammatical > phonetic > expressive errors.However,the discrepancy still existed.A vast majority of students expected that all types of oral errors could be corrected “always”,but the teachers preferred providing feedback “often” or “sometimes”;With regard to the different methods of giving oral CF,great differences existed in terms of explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback.The students favored explicit correction most,but this method was not popular among the teachers.Metalinguistic feedback was also favored by students,but it was not favored by teachers because it was time-consuming;Students and teachers shared a common view of that oral CF should be provided shortly after the oral errors were committed,teachers should not interrupt student at the beginning of their speaking activity.Regarding the question of who should provide oral CF,they held opposite views on it,most of the students believed in teachers? authority of doing correction,but the teachers hoped their students could do more self-correction and classmates? mutual-correction;3)The students had a very positive feelings towards their teachers? oral CF on the whole,and they hoped to get more explicit oral correction from the teachers;4)The teachers had varied concerns about providing oral CF,it seemed that most of the teachers had a preoccupation that their oral CF would trigger the students? negative emotions.Although sometimes students? stated beliefs may not fully correspond their actual feeling,these results nonetheless suggested that teachers should make use of more explicit and direct types of oral CF.The findings of the previous studies may help junior high school teachers understand the oral corrective feedback better.Based on the major findings,some implications for junior high school English teaching were discussed in the last chapter,followed by the limitations of the present study and suggestions for further research.