Teacher’s Error Correction: A Key Factor in Developing Iranian EFL Learners’ Speech Accuracy

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of the teacher’s error correction on the accuracy of the EFL learners’ speech. In this regard the proposed null hypothesis is: “There is no significant relationship between the teacher’s syntactic error correction and the EFL learners’ speech accuracy”. In order to test the null hypothesis, 95 students who study English as a Foreign language at Azad university, Mashhad branch participated in a TOEFL test, 40 of them were ranked as “intermediate” and were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. Both groups took part in an interview performed by the researcher as the pre-test. During the treatment procedure, in the experimental group, the syntactic errors of the students were corrected by the teacher as soon as they committed them in their speech. On the other hand the syntactic errors of the students’ speech in the control group were totally ignored by the teacher. After the treatment, which took 16 sessions, the students participated in another interview as the post-test. Both the pre-test and post-test interviews plus all the class discussions during the treatment were tape recorded. The interviews were scored by five raters. In order to compare the means of the post-test scores of the experimental and control groups a t-test was calculated. The observed t was 2.072 and t critical was 2.021.Since the observed t exceeded the t critical, the null hypothesis was rejected. We can conclude that “There is a significant relationship between the teacher’s syntactic error correction and the EFL learners’ speech accuracy”. The results of this study can be useful for language educators in dealing with their students’ syntactic errors in speaking.