A Study On The Effects Of English Teachers' Oral Corrective Feedback Toward Young Language Learners' Uptake

With the increasing proportion of young second language learners in China's educational market,scholars in linguistic area focus second language classroom interaction gradually.Teachers' oral corrective feedback and subsequent student uptake and repairs have aroused relevant great attention,and a large number of empirical studies and theoretical discussions have been carried out at home and abroad.However,almost all of the researches focus on junior high school students and college students,especially in China,there are few empirical studies involving the teachers in primary schools and students who are young language learners as the participants.Inspired by the research of Lyster and Ranta(1997),this paper explores the relationship between the oral corrective feedback given by primary school teachers to these young learners and students' immediate uptake and repair with the help of Lyster's research results over the next ten years.In the present study,samples were collected from a key foreign language school in Nanchang.The study aims to answer two research questions: 1.What are the types and distribution of teacher oral corrective feedback toward young learners? 2.What types of corrective feedback lead to young learners' uptake of grammatical,lexical and phonological errors?Through the analysis of classroom observation,recordings and interviews with teachers and students after class,the following findings were made:(1)In primary schools,English teachers adopted six types of corrective feedback,respectively are explicit correction,elicitation,metalinguistic request,repetition,classification request and recast.Among the three types of errors,grammatical errors were the most frequent ones,followed by phonological errors and lexical errors.Teacher corrective feedback types are closely related to the types of young learner errors.For grammatical errors,teachers tended to adopt elicitation;for phonological errors,teachers were more likely to employ explicit correction;for lexical errors,teachers were inclined to introduce recasts.Teachers chose to give different oral corrective feedback in terms of different kinds of errors generated in the classes.(2)The types of teacher oral corrective feedback are also found to be correlated to the types of learner uptake.This study finds that most of the oral corrective feedback received learner uptake and repair successfully.For grammatical errors,elicitation took up the highest repair rate;for phonological errors,repetition leaded to a higher repair rate;for lexical errors,repetition still resulted in the highest repair rate.What's more,when initiating learner uptake and repair,elicitation seems to be the most successful type of corrective feedback,while recasting and explicit correction are less effective.The latter two types of corrective feedback often lead to nonverbal uptake and lack of uptake.Generally speaking,this study is different from previous studies in addressing oral corrective feedback and learner uptake mode.These differences can be explained according to the unique instructional environment and participants,so the results are also quite different.However,this research still needs further improvement.For example,the long-term impact of teacher's oral error correction feedback on primary school students' language competence needs to be further explored.