An Investigation into Teachers’ Corrective Feedback in Chinese EFL Classrooms

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the provision of teachers’ corrective feedback (CF) and its effect on learners’ uptake in Chinese EFL classrooms. It investigated what CF strategies were used and examined the effect of error types on strategy choice as well as the effect of CF strategies on learners’ response. The subjects were four teachers and 89 English majors from a foreign language school and a top university. Data were collected through 40 class hours of classroom observation and interviews carried out with the four teachers. The CF strategies used were then analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings are summarized as follows: 1. In Chinese EFL classrooms, a new type of CF was included, namely, nonverbal signals. With nonverbal signals, teachers could use gestures or facial expressions to indicate the existence of errors in students’ utterance. Altogether teachers provided seven types of CF in Chinese senior-school and college EFL classrooms: explicit correction, recast, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, repetition and nonverbal signals. All of the seven CF types can be explicit or implicit, input-providing or output-prompting. Implicit/input- providing feedback dominates in the different CF types. 2. Different error types led to different choice of feedback strategies. Discourse errors attracted greatest attention from teachers who showed much more tolerance for syntactic errors than other CF types. Recasts, as implicit/input-providing feedback, were still used most frequently in treating all the error types while teachers tended to prompt students’ self correction when lexical and discourse errors occurred in order to make error correction salient to learners. 3. Output-prompting feedback worked more effectively in eliciting learners’ uptake than input- providing strategies did. But input-providing feedback moves yielded a lower needs-repair rate, which means students could do self-correction more successfully when offered with input-providing feedback.The results reveal that different CF strategies can be used according to the nature of errors and thus will yield different responses from learners. Based on these findings, the study suggests that teachers should employ different feedback strategies to improve their teaching qualities.