JOURNAL 2

Perceptions of Oral Errors and Their Corrective Feedback: Teachers vs. Students
Elżbieta Tomczyk
Department of English Studies, Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts, Kalisz, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Ploland
Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 924-931, September 2013

The current study was undertaken to investigate the perception of errors during speaking activities as well as corrective feedback from both teachers and students perspective, and to check what techniques are used by teachers in or-der to repair erroneous forms created by their students. The researcher also aimed at exploring the actual decisions that are made in the classroom by the teachers and find some similarities and differences with the previously stated beliefs.
The participants of the study were 43 secondary school teachers and 250 learners of English as a foreign language, who filled out questionnaires and were observed in real-life situations occurring in the language classroom. As regards the decision-making process and corrective feed-back, the analysis of the data revealed both differences and similarities in the opinions of the two groups of respondents in comparison with the actual classroom conditions, which indicate that correcting students’ erroneous forms is a complex issue meriting further investigation and consideration.
In order to make the study more comprehensive, the researcher decided to select two methods of data collection, namely: questionnaires and observations. The collected data were subjected to both qualitative and quantitative analysis taking into account the belief that the amalgamation of the qualitative and quantitative approaches can be beneficial when conducting classroom-oriented research (Brumfit & Mitchel, 1990).
One of the objectives of the present study was to investigate the opinions about oral errors which affect the later decisions involving corrective feedback. The collected results of both the teacher‟s and the students‟ questionnaires were analysed and compared focusing mostly on similarities and differences between them.
On the basis of the data, the importance of corrective feedback seems to be unquestionable, since the majority of both teachers and students (81.4% of the teachers and 92.8% of the learners) agreed that errors have to be corrected. According to the teachers, a learner needs to receive the information of their errors, so that he or she does not commit the same error repeatedly in the future. What is more, corrective feedback helps teachers in controlling students‟ utter-ances and it also improves the effectiveness of them. It must be highlighted that students should be aware of their erro-neous forms, since in many cases error correction motivates to work on their deviant forms and, as a consequence, make a progress. As a result, the teachers use corrective feedback rather often, namely 55,8% of them declared to do that frequently. The learners answered similarly to the teachers, stating that the most crucial argument in favour of corrective feedback is that errors have to be eliminated as soon as possible, before the habit-formation takes place and wrong forms become part of the students’ interlanguage.
The study makes clear that corrective feedback is considered to be a crucial part in the language learning, and it is even expected by most students. In addition, the majority of both teachers and learners declare grammatical and pronunciation errors as the ones which seem to be the most crucial as far as error correction is concerned. The findings also reveal that it is a teacher who is regarded as a competent, non-erring and ultimate authority, as a result, he or she is supposed to provide corrective feedback whenever deviant forms occur. Although peer correction and self-correction have many benefits and the majority of teachers declare to promote these types of correction in the classroom, the students seem not to appreciate them and they expect their teachers to rectify what they do not know. It has also been proved that contrary to immediate correction, which is usually regarded as disruptive or even irritating, delayed correction is used the most frequently by teachers, in spite of the fact that it is not as beneficial as it might be seen, since learners’ processing mechanisms are less likely to be activated. Among many techniques that might be used in providing corrective feedback, teachers tend to use explicit forms of indicating the appearance of errors, for instance by means of gestures and mimes, or by using a rising tone.
From students’ perspective, the best option on giving corrective feedback is not only indicating that a student has committed an error, but also reintroducing rules or a definition for the wrongly used item. The study demonstrates that students might react to corrective feedback in a number of ways, however, the findings reveal that learners usually feel content when they receive corrective feedback, which prevents them from committing the same errors in the future.