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This study investigates English majors’ attitudes to and comments on corrective feedback received from native English teachers, aiming to find whether there are gaps or contradiction between teachers’ performance and students’ expectation; then guiding teachers to form a sounder understanding and utilization method of oral corrective feedback, and at the same time, encouraging students to treat corrective feedback more rationally as they should not absorb teachers’ words blindly but can put forward their own ideas and opinions sometimes.
This essay consists of four parts, respectively discussing previous literature, methodology of the research, results of the research and findings and suggestions concluded from the results.
2. Literature review
2.1 The definition of corrective feedback
The term corrective feedback has stood in the center of hot debates for many years since it plays an important role in second language teaching. Generally speaking, in this research, corrective feedback refers to teachers’ correction and guidance provided for students’ oral mistakes and errors.
Vigil and Oller (1976) made distinctions between cognitive and affective feedback: the former kind relates to real understanding while the latter concerns the motivational support with which interlocutors provide for each other during an interaction. Chaudorn (1988) held the view that corrective feedback can be defined as teachers’ response to learners’ errors, being used to inform the learners of those errors. Angelo (1991) argued that corrective feedback is a kind of information provided by the teachers to inform the learners about their in-class performance, attempting to improve learners’ performance.
Long (1996) put forward a more detailed definition of corrective feedback from the perspective of positive evidence and negative evidence which suggests that positive evidence, such as offering the models of what is grammatically correct and acceptable in the target language to learners, can be defined as the information that tells the learners correct expressions of target language based on modified language or native speech; while negative evidence refers to the direct or indirect information that guides the learners to have the knowledge of the inappropriate use of the target language, which was mainly presented by way of such two forms as explicit and implicit. At the same time, Lightbown and Spada (1999:171) made the definition of corrective feedback more specific as any indication to the learners that their use of the target language is incorrect. In their argument, various responses that the learners received were included in corrective feedback.
2.2 Relevant studies on corrective feedback
2.2.1 Studies Abroad
Dating back to the early years in the 1990s, some scholars devoted their efforts into the research of what influence does corrective feedback has on the language acquisition of language learners and have got quite various findings and conclusions. Among those researchers, Carroll and Swain (1993) found that adult learners have the ability and action to understand both concrete and abstract rules of a foreign language by making use of corrective feedback collected from their teachers, while Dekeyser (1993), along with his partners, came to a conclusion that corrective feedback does not have an overall effect on the proficiency of learner’s second language using but it can interact and interplay with other kinds of elements of learning, for example, extrinsic motivation.
In recent years, recast, one form of corrective feedback, and its functions of pushing forward the learners’ language acquisition have sparkled a hot discussion in the field of corrective feedback research. Han (2002) studied the influence of recast on tense consistency during the output of a second language. The researcher concluded that recast can not only improve the second language awareness of learners, but can also significantly enhance learners’ ability of mastering tense consistency during the process of both oral and written second language output. Leeman (2003) investigated the relationship between recast and and the development of language learning. The findings shows that recast plays a positive role in promoting second language acquisition. However, from the results of Ranta’s (1997) and Lyster’s (1998) studies, it can be found that although recast is one of the important parts of teachers’ in class teaching methods, it still lacks efficiency of encouraging learners to correct themselves while it is negotiation of form that can put learners in the stage of self correcting more effectively.