JOURNAL 1:

Error Correction Strategies for the Classroom Oral Proficiency Used By Jordanian Teachers at Secondary Level

Abeer Al-Ghazo (Assistant Professor, TEFL)
Ajloun National University (Ajloun, Jordan)
E-mail: fares.abeer@yahoo.com, Published: October 02, 2016

The aim of the present study was to explore the Jordanian EFL teachers' error correction strategies for the classroom oral proficiency at secondary level. And the keywords of this study are: Oral error correction, Teachers, Students and Correction strategies. In the field of EFL, there have been some efforts to study the corrective feedback in English as Foreign Language （EFL）classrooms. EFL students' oral proficiency should be corrected. Correcting students’ oral language errors is a complex aspect of foreign language teaching.
Error correction (EC) helps teacher to determine their classroom teaching practices and their teaching methodology to improve their students' oral proficiency. To measure the learners' level of oral proficiency in the language, they should be assessed regularly to suggest proper solution, and then enhance their performance in learning the English language. EC is considered to be one of the important parts of teaching/ learning process.
Lyster and Ranta indicate different types of error treatment, or corrective feedback, with student responses to that feedback, or “learner uptake” (1997, p. 40). They identified six types of feedback teachers used Explicit correction: indicating that the student’s utterance was incorrect, the teacher provides thecorrect form. Recast: indicating that the student’s utterance was incorrect, the teacher implicitly reformulates the student’s error, or provides the correction. Clarification request: the teacher indicates that the message has not been understood or that the student’s utterance contained some kind of mistake and that a repetition or a reformulation is required. Met linguistic clues: the teacher provides comments or information related to the formation of the student’s utterance. Elicitation: the teacher directly elicits the correct form from the student by asking many questions. Repetition: The teacher repeats the student’s error and tries to draw student’s attention to it (pp.46-48).
This study attempts to answer the following question: What are the main error correction strategies used by teachers at secondary level to develop the classroom oral proficiency?
The generalization of the results of the study is limited by these factors:
1.    This study is conducted on female EFL Jordanian teachers in Ajloun Directorate of Education in the academic year 2015/2016. Therefore, the generalizability of the results of this study is applicable to similar populations only.
2.    The number of the participants of the study (40 teachers) is relatively small.
For the purpose of obtaining information needed to achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers used the Teacher's Preference Elicitation Questionnaire. The Questionnaire was adapted from Michael (2007) to elicit the types of oral corrective feedback that teachers use to correct their students' oral errors, grammatical and pronunciation errors. To guarantee the validity of the questionnaire, a number of TEFL specialists in Jordanian universities will assess it. The reliability of the questionnaire was measured by administering 20 ones to 20 female and male teachers who were chosen from outside the participants of the study for the second time after two weeks from collecting the questionnaires which were administrated earlier.
To answer the question, the researchers calculated means for error correction strategies for the classroom oral proficiency used by teachers at secondary level.

Techniques                                Means     Description
Recast                                      4.25         Very good
Explicit Correction.                   3.48         Very good
Repetition of Error                    3.48          good
Elicitation.                                 3.72          good
Metalingustic Feedback.           3.99          Very good
Clarification Request                 3.68          good
Denial.                                      2.34          acceptance
Questioning (Peer Correction    3.59          good
Questioning (Self Correction)    2.94          acceptance
Ignorance                                 1.49          poor
Total                                                         3.296

As Table reveals, teachers used all types of oral corrective feedback with a mean. Meta linguistic feedback, recast, elicitation, instructions and questioning (Peer-correction) were reported to be the most used types of oral corrective feedback.). We can notice the big gap between the use of denial and ignorance and other strategies. The usage of recast by teachers might be that strategy may encourage slow learners to continue speaking without explicitly correcting their error.
Requesting and questioning (Peer-correction) were also highly used as they had means of (3.68) and (3.59) respectively. This could focus on teachers' desire to increase students' participation by using request and questioning (peer-correction). By this way Learners learn how to correct each other errors in face-to-face interaction in a safe environment. As the table shows, self correction, ignorance and denial strategies have the lowest usage in this category.
Based on the findings of the study, teachers favor corrections of language errors; and they did not neglect any of the errors and treated errors immediately using different strategies. These strategies give teachers clear pictures about their classroom practices on how they correct their students’ oral errors .On other words, it enables teachers to arrive at their own judgments as to what works and what does not work in their classrooms. Moreover, it can narrow the gap between teacher’s imagined view of their own teaching and reality.