An Investigation On Oral Error Correction In Junior Middle School English Classes

For foreign language learners,errors are inevitable.Teachers’ proper and effective error correction will improve learner’ oral English proficiency.In junior middle school English classes,what is the current situation of teachers’ oral error correction? This is an issue that deserves investigation.At present,most of the research on error correction in China is based on the background of college classroom teaching.Since most researchers pay more attention to higher education,there are few researches on basic education.Especially the relevant researches on error correction in middle school English classes are not comprehensive and exhaustive.This study is based on Five Questions raised by Chaudron(1988).By investigating the current situation of teachers’ error correction,junior middle school English teachers will be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of their own error correction behavior.Moreover,the author puts forward some suggestions on oral English teaching.The subjects of the research are 407 students and 15 English teachers from Zoucheng NO.8 Junior Middle School.According to relevant studies on error-correction,there are mainly four kinds of errors in junior middle school English classes,including phonological errors,lexical errors,grammatical errors and expression errors.The author comes up with three research questions as follows:(1)What is the frequency of correction of these four kinds of errors?(2)When do teachers correct these four kinds of errors?(3)What kinds of error-correction strategies are used to correct these four kinds of errors? The author conducts the study by classroom observation,questionnaires and interviews.The major findings are put forward:(1)The most frequently corrected is grammatical errors,phonological errors take second place,lexical errors is less,expression errors is infrequent.(2)Lexical errors,grammatical errors and expression errors are corrected after students’ speech.Teachers tend to correct students’ phonological errors after students’ speech,while students tend to correct it immediately.(3)Teachers and studentsprefer to use explicit correction and recasts to correct phonological and grammatical errors respectively.For lexical errors,teachers use recasts,while students choose explicit correction.For expression errors,teachers use clarification,while students choose recasts.In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the oral error correction in middle school English classes,this research comes up with the practical teaching suggestions and error-correction strategies,tries to solve the problems existing in oral English teaching.