Errors and corrective feedback : what do students think about being corrected?

Abstract

The present paper describes and analyses the patterns of teacher feedback to students’ errors and learners’ attitude and preferences towards error correction and examines feedback techniques used by the teacher over a nine-week period in two adult intermediate level English classes of the American University of Armenia (AUA) Extension Program. The study also investigates students’ perception of corrective feedback and teacher response to students’ errors in an adult Armenian EFL classroom. The database consists of a questionnaire and of 6 hours of videotaped interaction between the teacher and 21 students. The classroom interaction was videotaped and transcribed according to Lyster and Ranta’s corrective discourse model (1997). While analyzing the questionnaire results, it was found that, overall, students liked to be corrected, and they were sure that the teacher’s corrective feedback helped them to improve their oral production. The videotaped data revealed that grammatical errors were the error types most frequently treated by the teacher in this study, and they were also the ones that the students felt needed the most correction. It was also found that recast was the most widely used feedback type in this study.