Abstract
Researchers have put forth a lot of effort in the field of oral corrective feedback for the past several decades. However, few studies have looked at the overlap of teachers’ corrective intentions and students’ interpretations. Thus, the purposes of the present study are to find out (1) the extent teachers make deliberate efforts to correct students’ errors in classroom settings; (2) the overlap of teachers’ corrective intentions and students’ interpretations ; and (3) students’ opinions and feelings about oral corrective feedback. In the present study, two freshman classes were observed and recorded for five weeks. There were totally two teachers and 51 students participating in this study. During the observation period, 20 feedback-giving events were selected from the video recordings of the two classes. The 20 events were almost equally distributed to students’ three oral error types, namely, phonological, grammatical, and lexical errors and with various teachers’ corrective feedback types contained. The two teachers were asked to recall their intentions to every corrective feedback event individually no more than one week after they finished each class. The 20 feedback-giving events along with 10 distractors were later combined to form a new video clip. All student participants had to watch the video and fill in a questionnaire at the same time. The questionnaire first asked students to judge the correctness and error type of student utterances in the video clip. Then, students had to interpret the intention of teachers’ utterances. The questionnaire provided five fixed interpretations for students to interpret the teachers’ intentions. After finishing the questionnaire, the researcher interviewed 16 of the student participants. These selected students were those who received the teachers’ most corrective feedback or those who had never been corrected by the teachers. The interviewees were invited to share their opinions and feelings about the teachers’ corrective feedback. The results show that the teachers had corrective intentions when giving responses to students’ phonological, grammatical, and lexical errors. Both teachers revealed different amounts of corrective intentions and sometimes they had more than one intention when correcting students. However, results seemed to indicate that students could successfully interpret teachers’ intentions only when the correction was focused on phonological errors. Most of teachers’ other corrective feedback was regarded as non-corrective. Therefore, it is suggested that teachers may focus more on phonological errors than other errors if they choose to correct students’ errors. Also, when correcting students’ errors, teachers need integrate more hints and strategies, especially when the errors are non-phonological. Otherwise, the possibility of students’ correcting their errors will be very limited since students do not even notice the correction.