An Investigation On Teachers’ Corrective Feedback And Learners’ Uptake In Junior High School English Classroom

As a necessary part of classroom discourse,teachers’ corrective feedback has attracted more and more attention from language educators and researchers in the field of classroom interaction.Researches indicate that corrective feedback given by teachers can give rise to learners’ uptake,which has a great influence on both classroom teaching and learners’ language acquisition.However,there are few studies on corrective feedback for different types of errors and its effects on learners’ uptake.Thus,based on the research framework of Lyster and Ranta(1997),this study is conducted with the purpose to investigate the distributions of teachers’ corrective feedback and learners’ uptake for different errors.There are there research questions:(1)What are the distributions of teachers’ corrective feedback for different types of students’ errors?(2)What are the effects of teachers’ corrective feedback on learners’ uptake for different errors?(3)What are the students’ attitudes towards corrective feedback? The research is carried out in four classes from Grade 7 and Grade 8 in No.52 Middle School of Zhengzhou City for one-month classroom observation.Altogether 1600 minutes(10 lessons in each class)are recorded in the four classes.The research subjects are 225 students and 4 English teachers.At the same time,students’ questionnaires are distributed to investigate the students’ attitudes towards teachers’ corrective feedback.This study obtains the following findings after statistical analysis:(1)In English classroom interaction,the frequently used types of teachers’ corrective feedback are recast,elicitation and explicit correction,followed by metalinguistic feedback,clarification request and repetition.For phonological errors,the most frequently used corrective feedback by teachers is explicit correction.Grammatical errors are commonly treated by recast and elicitation as teachers’ corrective feedback.As for lexical errors and expression errors,teachers are inclined to employ elicitation and sometimes choose clarification request.(2)Learners’ uptake after teachers’ corrective feedback can be divided into repair,needs-repair and no uptake.For phonological errors,explicit correction and recast bring about a large proportion of students’ repair.For grammatical errors,metalinguistic feedback and explicit correction are repaired by students,while recast and elicitation lead to few parts of repair in correcting errors.In terms of the lexical errors and expression errors,clarification request receives the highest rate of repair from students,while elicitation receives more students’ needs-repair and even no uptake.(3)Students attach great importance to the role of teachers’ corrective feedback in classroom and hope that all errors can be corrected by teachers’ corrective feedback.Different from the results of the distributions of teachers’ corrective feedback,data show that students prefer grammatical errors to be treated by metalinguistic feedback and expression errors to be treated by recast.