Regassa, Taye (PhD)Anteneh, Animaw2018-06-262023-11-182018-06-262023-11-182011-05http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/12345678/3521There 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 errorsenPhilosophyThesis