Abstract
Nowadays, almost all junior high school students in China are learning English as a second language. English classroom teaching has naturally become one of the most important parts of English education. And during second language acquisition, there is one unavoidable thing: error. There are a plenty of theories about error analysis and error correction. In this paper, the researcher focused on junior high school students’ preferences toward English classroom error correction. Five key questions were raised to make the research more targeted: Should errors be corrected? What kind of errors should be corrected? When should errors be corrected? Who should do the correction? How to correct the errors?
Questionnaire, classroom observation, and individual interview have been used to research. According to the analysis of the data, conclusions have been drawn that students are willing to accept language error corrections though they sometimes may feel embarrassed if the correction happens frequently. And they think grammatical errors and lexical errors should be corrected most. When it comes to when errors should be corrected, most students prefer to get the correction right after they finish their speech. As for who should correct their errors, most students trust their teachers and hope they can be the one who correct the errors. Toward the strategies the researcher gave in the questionnaire, students showed their favor in repetition, recasts, and explicit correction. While mate-linguistic feedback is not popular among them.
In addition to the students’ preferences, the researcher also interviewed some teachers. It turned out that teachers’ opinions can basically match the students’ preferences. Though there still are several differences between teachers’ behavior and student’s expectation, they are not wide gap, just small differences. Thus the situation is positive in general, but there still is room for improvement.
Keywords: errors, error correction, SLA, students’ preferences
Contents
Abstract
摘 要
1. Introduction-1
2. Literature review-2
2.1 The Definition of Error-2
2.2 The Classification of Errors-2
2.2.1 Pre-systematic Error, Systematic Error, and Post-systematic Error-2
2.2.2 Intra-lingual Error, Inter-lingual Error, and Induced Error-3
2.2.3 Other Ways of Classifying-3
2.3 Error Correction-3
2.3.1 Different Attitudes toward Error and Error Correction-4
2.3.2 What Kind of Errors Should be Corrected?-5
2.3.3 Strategies of Classroom Error Correction-5
3. Research Methods-8
4. Findings-9
4.1 Should Errors be Corrected?-9
4.2 What Kind of Errors Should be Corrected?-10
4.3 When Should the Errors be Corrected?-11
4.4 Who Should Do the Error Correction?-11
4.5 How to Correct Language Errors in English Class?-12
4.6 Students’ Preferences and The Real Situation in Their English Class-13
5. Discussion-14
References-15
