A Comparison Of Preferences For Oral Error Correction Between Junior High School Students With Different English Speaking Anxiety

According to the Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard（2022）,junior high school students are encouraged to actively speak English in English activities in and out of the class.Teachers’ inappropriate error correction methods will increase students’ English speaking anxiety and reduce their enthusiasm for oral English learning.Different from other researches,this study uses Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Self-Schema（FLSAS）as the measuring tool to classify the subjects into different English speaking anxiety categories through K-means cluster analysis on the basis of Contrastive Analysis,Error Analysis and Affective Filter Hypothesis,so as to explore the following questions:1.What is the overall level of junior high school students’ English speaking anxiety?2.What are the overall preferences for oral English error correction of junior high school students?3.What are the similarities and differences of preferences for oral error correction between junior high school students with different English speaking anxiety?The subjects were 154 students from three parallel classes in Grade 8 of Huai’an Qinghe Experimental Junior High School.The instruments of quantitative study consisted of two questionnaires.The first one was FLSAS,with a total of 20 items used to measure students’ English speaking anxiety from six dimensions.The second one was Questionnaire of Preferences for Oral English Error Correction（POEEC）,with a total of 20 items used to measure students’ oral English error correction preferences from five dimensions.148 valid questionnaires were collected,and then the data collected from the questionnaires were further analyzed by SPSS 22.0.The major findings of the study were as follows:Firstly,junior high school students’ English speaking anxiety was at medium level.They were sometimes very sensitive about their classmates’ or teachers’ evaluation of their oral English performance,resulting in exaggerated negative emotional experience in their oral English learning.Secondly,junior high school students believed that it was necessary to correct their oral English errors.They preferred teachers to their peers or themselves to correct their oral English errors（grammatical,phonetic,lexical,expression and discourse errors）.The most favored manner of error correction was repetition and the most favored timing was delayed correction.Thirdly,junior high school students with different English speaking anxiety all believed that it was necessary to correct oral English errors and they all preferred delayed correction.However,there were significant differences of the preferences in three dimensions:the type（grammatical errors）,the implementer（teacher correction and peer correction）and the manner of oral English error correction（recasts and metalinguistic feedback）.This study offers the following pedagogical implications.It is advised for teachers to create a more relaxed classroom atmosphere for oral English teaching and learning and to give students more encouraging and enlightening evaluation on their oral English errors.Moreover,according to the oral English error correction preferences of students with different anxiety categories,error correction should be carried out differently.This study still had some limitations.It only investigated junior high school students’oral English error correction preferences according to their English speaking anxiety,and the sample size was limited.Future research should expand the sample size,consider some other influencing factors of their oral English error correction preferences,and combine with teachers’ teaching experience and views.