A Study On Teachers’ Oral Corrective Feedback And Student Uptake In Senior High School English Class

In SLA research field,teachers’ corrective feedback,as an essential part of teacher-student interaction in classroom,has been thickly studied and the relation between corrective feedback and learner uptake have been paid much attention in recent decades.Albeit ample researches affirmed that teacher’s oral corrective feedback does invite student uptake and poses substantial influence on language learning,there remains few studies of corrective feedback across more diverse types of English learners’ error.Investigations in Chinese EFL context seldomly cover pragmatic error which is easily committed by EFL learners as its error type.Besides,secondary school English class,particularly senior high school,is rarely selected as research subject regardless of its paramount significance to Chinese English learning.In this case,following Lyster and Ranta(1997),who paved a sound foundation in studying corrective feedback and learner uptake,with theory underpinnings from error analysis to Long’s Interaction Hypothesis,Swain’s Output Hypothesis,Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis and Focus on Form,the present study investigates the correlation among students’ errors,teachers’ oral corrective feedback and student uptake in senior high school English class in Chinese EFL setting.The main contents this study concentrates on are as follows: 1)what types of learner error invite what types of teachers’ oral corrective feedback? 2)what types of teachers’ oral corrective feedback invite what types of student uptake? 3)what types of teachers’ oral CF for each kind of error are favored by students? The research,carried out in an average senior high school in Nan’an district of Chongqing,adopts classroom observation,questionnaire survey plus interview as research instruments.Through two-month classroom observation in 4 classes taught by3 teachers,a questionnaire survey for 215 student respondents and interviews on three teachers and 16 disparate-level students,the yielded results include: 1)In an overall view,recast is used at the highest frequency by senior high school English teachers,followed by metalinguistic feedback,explicit correction and elicitation.Among them,most recast are invited by phonological errors;largest part of metalinguistic feedback is employed for grammatical errors;pragmatic errors mainly bring about explicit correction while lexical errors are commonly treated with elicitation.2)In terms of inviting students’ successful uptake,metalinguistic feedback,explicit correction and recast rank top three respectively.Recast encourages most students’ repair for phonological errors;grammatical errors are repaired most after metalinguistic feedback;explicit correction is most useful for pragmatic error;elicitation gives rise to the highest rate of lexical repair.3)Majority of students attach much importance to error correction,especially to grammatical and lexical errors.Explicit correction is exceedingly favored by students particularly for lexical errors and pragmatic errors;metalinguistic feedback is preferred for grammatical errors;recast is valued for phonological errors.The research results show some enlightenments for helping Chinese high school English teachers make better use of oral corrective feedback and helping students to promote language output.It is recommended for teachers to understand the students’ preference for corrective feedback at the same time consider the discrepancy in students’ English proficiency so as to provide targeted corrective feedback to enhance student outcomes of English learning.