Oral Corrective Feedback: An Exploratory Case Study of the Interplay between Teachers’ Beliefs, Classroom Practices, and Rationales
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Date
2011-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
There is compelling evidence to indicate that the English proficiency of pre-service trainees at
the English Department of the Addis Ababa University is plummeting. They join university with
such poor English that it is almost impossible to raise it to the required level during the three
years they stay here to complete their studies for a bachelor’s degree. It is these graduates of the
Department that are deployed in the high schools as well as colleges and universities of the
country as English teachers.
There are obviously several reasons why the trainees join higher learning institutions with very
little English. The objective of this study was to look more closely into a specific factor in the
way teachers in high schools teach the language. More specifically, it aimed to explore the
manner in which four high school teachers in public schools in Addis Ababa treated their
students’ oral errors in the English classroom. Twenty-three lessons were video-recorded in their
natural setting before the teachers were interviewed to indirectly elicit their beliefs on the topic
of oral corrective feedback. After the in-depth interview with each teacher, the corrective
feedback episodes in the recorded data were identified and classified using a slightly modified
model of Lyster and Ranta (1997); some of these episodes were, then, shown to the respective
teachers to help them recall and reflect on what exactly happened and why they reacted to their
students’ errors the way they did. Their rationales were subsequently audio-recorded and
transcribed. Moreover, four teacher trainers from the English Department of the Addis Ababa
University were interviewed with the intent of finding out how these teachers had been trained to
deal with students’ oral errors in the first place. The material these trainers used in relation to the
topic at hand was also scrutinized to corroborate the information gathered from both the teachers
and the trainers.
Analyses of the data showed that the trainees did not have a firm theoretical ground on which
they based their actions. Rather, they reacted to their students’ errors based on what they
intuitively felt was right or they treated errors the way their own teachers treated their errors
when they were students themselves. They also tended to avoid correcting their students’ errors possibly due to lack of mastery of the language they are supposed to teach. It was also found that
the trainers were not up-to-date with the current literature on the issue and had very divergent
views. The material they used was found to be scanty and lacking in coherence. It is, therefore,
recommended that trainees’ English proficiency be an important criterion before they are
admitted into the teaching profession, that trainers keep themselves abreast of the current
developments in the area and upgrade the material they are using for the training, and that shortterm
trainings be organized for English teachers at all levels to help them raise the level of their
proficiency in English in general as well as to expose them to more recent theories of language
learning/teaching so that they can experiment with newer ways of dealing with students’ oral errors
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Philosophy