CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This initial chapter states the problem and the rationale of the study, together with the aims, objectives, scope, methods and the significance of the whole paper. Above all, it is in this chapter that the research questions are set out to work as the guidelines for the whole research. 1.1. Statement of the problem and rationale for the study The requirements of English teaching-learning to meet communicative needs in real life have made traditional teaching methods, whose objectives are the acquisition of grammar and vocabulary, gradually give way to communicative language teaching (CLT) approach. In the light of CLT, “learners need to develop the ability to use the language they are learning appropriately in a given social encounter.” (Hymes, 1972) This approach, in recent years, has been applied in Vietnam. In the past, a perfect lesson would be a lesson without students’ mistakes. “Instead of correcting the student, the teacher would say: “Sit down” in a disciplinary way or walk away from the student who had made a mistake.” (Nguyen, B., Bui, L.C., Truong, V.D., Ho, T.M.H., Nguyen, H., Bao, K. et al., 2003). In contrast, in the communicative approach, making errors is a necessary and natural process of language teaching. Also, correction is an integral part of the lesson. Therefore, it is important for teachers to give corrective feedback on students’ errors. Researchers have shown that teachers’ corrective feedback enables students to notice the gap between their interlanguage forms and the target language forms. (Schmidt & Frota, 1986). Additionally, corrective feedback from teachers also leads to the enhancement of learners’ metalinguistic 1 awareness (Swain, 1995). Besides, it helps increase motivation and builds a supportive classroom climate. For first-year students, majoring in English, at University of Language and International Studies (ULIS), who were too familiar with the Grammar- Translation teaching method at secondary schools, speaking skill is considered to be the most challenging one. They encounter many difficulties in communication process, such as mispronouncing, using words out of context, or making syntax errors. Thus, teachers’ corrective feedback plays an indispensable role in helping freshmen to improve their speaking skills. However, the issue of corrective feedback provision still remains a sophisticated one because on the one hand, most students want and expect the teacher to give them corrective feedback on their performance (Harmer, 2001). On the other hand, students of high self-esteem are easily demotivated by teachers’ straightforward error correction. Moreover, corrective feedback may intervene in the flow of students’ ideas. Hence, it would be helpful for teachers to find out students’ preferences and attitudes to corrective feedback so that they can make the right decisions about when to correct, what to correct, or which type of corrective feedback to be used in response to particular types of error and so on. Although the topic of teachers’ corrective feedback has been widely researched by different scholars worldwide and starts to be paid attention to in Vietnam, not many studies have been done concerning both the situation of teachers’ corrective feedback provision and students’ attitudes. Also, first-year students (who initially entered university with a big leap from the way they are used to study in high schools and the more independent way of study they are expected to follow at universities) seems to receive less consideration in previous research. 2 All those reasons stimulate the researcher to conduct a study on teachers’ corrective feedback to first-year students in English speaking lessons at English Department (ED), ULIS in the hope that it will make a contribution to the field it is envisioned and fill the gaps in former research. 1.2. Aims and objectives of the study First of all, the study sets out to explore the current situation of teachers’ giving corrective feedback to first-year students at ED, ULIS in English speaking lessons, including when to correct, what to correct, the frequency of different corrective feedback types used and choice of corrective feedback types in response to different types of error. Secondly, the relationship between teachers’ corrective feedback types and students’ uptake and repair is given a close look to examine which types lead to the most amount of students’ uptake and repair. Additionally, students’ attitudes to the way the teacher gives corrective feedback and preferences for the particular type of corrective feedback in accordance with the particular type of error are taken into consideration, paving the way for several pedagogical implications to enhance the efficacy of teachers’ corrective feedback on students’ errors. In particular, the research paper seeks the answers to the following research question: What is the relationship between teachers’ different corrective feedback types and students’ uptake and repair? This question is broken down into three sub-questions: 1. In what ways do teachers give corrective feedback to first-year students in English speaking lessons? 2. What are students’ attitudes towards and preferences of teachers’ giving corrective feedback? 3. Which types of corrective feedback lead to most uptake and repair? 1.3. Scope of the study 3 There are different kinds of teachers’ feedback, such as oral versus written feedback, evaluative versus descriptive feedback, or corrective, motivational, and reinforcing feedback. However, within the scope of a research paper and due to the time limitation, this study just focuses on teachers’ oral corrective feedback in speaking lessons for first-year mainstream students. Teachers of the First-year Division and first-year mainstream students at ED, ULIS are the samples, whose participation would be of great contribution to the accomplishment of the study. 1.4. Methods of the study (phần 1.4, 1.5 và 1.6 em viết thêm so với bản Proposal) 1.4.1. Data collection methods This study employed the triangulation method of questionnaires, observation and retrospective interviews to attain the best exploitation of data. Specifically, two sets of questionnaires are used for students and teachers. For teachers: Survey questionnaires are employed to investigate the ways teachers give corrective feedback to their students in speaking lessons, and why they correct errors in those ways. This data would shed the light on the relationship between teachers’ view on error correction and the real types of correction they use. This kind of information would help the researcher get more ideas for the discussion. For students: Survey questionnaires would be delivered to 5 classes of first-year students to seek information about students’ perception of and attitudes towards the ways teachers give corrective feedback in speaking lessons. 4 In addition, classroom observation would be used to cross-check the questionnaire data, since a combination of different sources of data would help reduce bias. 5 classroom observations are conducted in 5 classes of first-year students to seek information about the current situation of teachers’ corrective feedback and students’ uptake and repair in speaking lessons. Finally, 10 students among those who have been given teachers’ oral corrective feedback in 5 observed lessons (2 students from each observed lesson) would take part in the retrospective interview. This instrument is used to find out students’ attitudes when they are given corrective feedback, students’ assessment of the success of teachers’ corrective feedback (which will be used for discussion). Retrospective interview also clarifies any unclear or unobtainable details via classroom observations. 1.4.2. Data analysis methods First, the collected data would be classified to answer the three research questions. The first and the last questions are expected to be solved by analyzing the data gathered from survey questionnaires and classroom observations while the data gathered from students’ survey questionnaires and retrospective interviews would seek the answer to the second question. The synthesis of all the findings would help draw pedagogical recommendations. After that, for each question, the data would be analyzed in categories, tables in which statistics such as percentage and frequency counts are calculated. The especially important data from interviews are cited when necessary to illustrate the data analysis. 1.5. Significance of the study The study is conducted to find out the relationship between teachers’ corrective feedback types and students’ uptake and repairs. Hopefully, it would make a contribution to the field that it is envisioned. As for teachers of 5 English, the paper would provide them with useful pedagogical suggestions related to error treatments, including who, when and what to correct. Also, it would reveal to them which types of corrective feedback to use according to students’ levels in order to lead to the greatest amount of uptake and repair. Regarding researchers, who share the same interest in the topic, they could rely on this paper to get useful information for their future studies. 1.6. An overview of the rest of the paper The rest of the paper includes four following chapters: Chapter 2 (Literature Review) provides the background of the study including definitions of key concepts, objectives of teaching speaking skill for first-year students in English Department, HULIS, VNU and discussions of related studies. Chapter 3 (Methodology) describes the selection of participants, data collection instruments and the procedures employed to conduct the research. Chapter 4 (Results and discussion) presents, analyzes and discusses the findings the researcher found out according to three research questions. Chapter 5 (Conclusion) summarizes the main issues discussed in the paper, provides some pedagogical implications and points out the limitations of the research as well as proposes several suggestions for further studies. Following this chapter are the References and Appendices. 6 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1. Key concepts 2.1.1. An overview of speaking skill 2.1.1.1. Definition of speaking skill There have been various ways of defining speaking skill. According to Chaney (1998, p.13), speaking is “the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts.” This definition shows that speaking covers both verbal and non- verbal messages. In language teaching, Nunan (2003) (as cited in Brown & Nation, 1997) puts it that “speaking is the productive oral skill. It consists of producing systematic verbal utterance to convey meaning” (as cited in Brown & Nation, 1997). Whereas Chaney considers speaking as a natural process of human beings, Nunan approaches it as a skill which is the deliberate practice through real-life experiences that users have. This study, which aims at investigating the speaking practice of students in terms of language skills, adopts Nunan’s definition. 2.1.1.2. Elements of speaking skill According to Bygate (1987), speaking requires encoding communicative intent often in the ‘here and now’. This is because of time-constraint and conditions inherent in listener-speaker situations. There is also the need to handle unpredictability of listener response. Hence, spoken language proficiency involves being able to produce accurately and fluently, autonomous utterances which are appropriate to the context of the speech situation. 7 Accuracy refers to the use of correct forms where utterances do not contain errors affecting the phonological, syntactic, semantic or discourse features of a language (Bryne, 1988). Fluency may be defined as the ability to get across communicative intent without too much hesitation and too many pauses to cause barriers or a breakdown in communication (Crystal, 1977; Bryne, 1988 & Nation, 1991). In language teaching and learning, there is no dining that fact that both accuracy and fluency are essential in language learning. Depended on the classroom objectives and tasks, there may be more focus on accuracy than fluency or vice versa. 2.1.2. Speaking errors 2.1.2.1. Definition of errors The term “error” is used in a variety of ways in linguistics and language teaching theory. In the early 1970s, research into “error” has demonstrated that learner errors indicate both the state of the learner’s knowledge and of the ways in which the second language is being learned. “Error” in English language teaching is a mark of a learner’s transitional competence as distinct from “mistake” or performance error (Corder, 1967) (as cited in Burt, 1975). In this way, errors arise because the correct form or use of a target item is not part of a speaker’s competence, whereas mistakes arise (for reasons of fatigue, stress, inattention) even though the correct form or use is part of the user’s competence. Another distinction between mistakes and errors, based on Snow (1977), depends on whether learners know they do something wrong and can fix it or not. From his viewpoint, errors occur when learners produce something wrong 8 without knowing it or even they might know about it, they can not make it right. In this study, an error is defined according to Snow (1977). Like language errors, speaking errors occur when speakers do not know about them or can not repair even being aware of errors. In short, as a kind of spoken language, errors can be simply understood as “faults made by speakers during the production of sounds, words and sentences.” (Richard and Platt, 1992) 2.1.2.2. Causes of errors Many reasons why learners make errors have been pointed out by linguistic scholars as well as language experts worldwide. Within this study, four most typical causes of errors are mentioned.  Inter-lingual interference There always exist some similarities between the mother tongue and the target language. For the similar part, the learner may transfer concepts from the mother tongue into the target language (Wang, 2000). But there also exists some diversities between them, so when the learners feel he could express in the equivalent way, he falls into pitfalls. For example: Our class has twenty boys and ten girls. Such sentences appear frequently owing to the influence of Vietnamese word order, which in English should be: There are twenty boys and ten girls in our class.  Intra-lingual interference Intra-lingual interference comes from the target language itself (Wang, 2000). When a learner has already known some grammar rules about that language, some knowledge learned earlier will have certain effects on his further study. For example: He buyed a picture. 9 Here, the speaker has already understood the past tense and verbal inflection in English, but he follows the general way to add “ed” to the verb “buy”.  Undevelopmental readiness According to Ellis (1994) (as cited in Burt, 1975), there are different stages in the process a foreign language perceives the language. Thus, when one is forced to produce an utterance that they are not yet developmentally ready for, they are likely to make errors.  Fossilization The term “fossilization” is used when describing “the process by which non-target forms become fixed in interlanguage.”(Ellis, 1994, as cited in Burt, 1975) More specifically, even after extended exposure to or instruction in the target language, errors seem to be permanent in the learner’s second language. (Elson, 2004) The fossilization may be due to the lack of corrective feedback when there should have been some. The willingness of the teacher to let errors go uncorrected may cause the persistence, an eventually, fossilization of such errors. 2.1.2.3. Classification of errors Errors can be classified in different ways based on the nature of such classification and the purpose of the author. With regard to the effects of errors, Burt (1975) divided errors into two types: global and local errors. Global errors are errors that significantly hinder communication are those that affect overall sentence organization. Local errors are errors that affect single elements (constituents) in a sentence do not usually hinder communication significantly, such as errors in noun and verb inflections, articles, auxiliaries and the formation of quantifiers. In other words, global errors - those that affect overall sentence organization - cause 10 [...]... continuation) If there is uptake, then the student’s initially erroneous utterance is either repaired or continues to need repair in some way If the utterance needs repair, then corrective feedback may again be provided by the teacher; if no further feedback is provided, then there is topic continuation If and when there is repair, then it is followed either by topic continuation or by some repair- related... circumvents the teacher’s linguistic focus altogether, without including any further errors 2.1.4.3 Relationship between teachers’ corrective feedback and students uptake 24 (Lyster and Ranta, 1997) Figure 2: Error treatment sequence The error treatment sequence emerges as the model presented in Figure 2 and it also reveals the relationship between teachers’ corrective feedback and students uptake According... Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) analysis, the sequence begins with a learner’s utterance containing at least one error The erroneous utterance is followed either by the teacher’s corrective feedback or not; if not, then there is topic continuation If corrective feedback is provided by the teacher, then it is either followed by uptake on the part of the student or not (no uptake entails topic continuation) If there... this second meaning of uptake is the one the researcher adopts, since she pays attention to the students reaction when feedback is provided by the teacher in the foreign language classroom 2.1.4.2 Types of student uptake According to Lyster and Ranta (1997), there are two types of student uptake: repair and needs -repair 2.1.4.2.1 Repair Lyster and Ranta (1997) defined repair as the correct reformulation... utterance, without the error The recast accounted for about half the total feedback, and led to the least uptake (31% of the time) In addition, the recast never led to student-generated repair; the learner merely repeated what the teacher had said On the contrary, elicitation and metalinguistic feedback, providing the correct form explicitly by indicating that what the student said is incorrect and giving... notes in the observation checklists Phase 3: After the classroom observation, the video segments were replayed All the students who had received teachers’ corrective feedback were paid attention to Because the number of students given teachers’ corrective feedback was not small, only the students (3 ones per class) including: students given corrective feedback immediately and until the end of the performance,... observation This instrument was developed to reveal the current practice of teachers’ giving oral corrective feedback to first-year students The information was about when teachers gave corrective feedback to students, who corrected the errors, what types of corrective feedback used in accordance with different types of errors Also, classroom observation was employed to examine students uptake and repair. .. observation The data and results were compared and exchanged between the two observers 3.3.2 Retrospective interview Another data gathering instrument employed in this study was a retrospective interview This instrument was used for the students who had received teachers’ corrective feedback in observed lessons It helped to find out students feelings, attitudes when they were give corrective feedback The. .. in other words, the information and the data was gathered as unobtrusively as possible When observing the lessons in progress, the researcher and her associate paid attention to each student’s errors in his/her utterance, watched for the teacher’s responses and noticed whether or not corrective feedback was given and how At the same time, they jotted down relevant information in the form of “X” and. .. findings of those researches on corrective feedback have motivated the present study Of particular relevance is Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) study of corrective feedback and learner uptake and, specifically, their analytical model of error treatment However, it can be seen that, studies on the relationship between corrective feedback and learner uptake (including Lyster and Ranta’s, 1997) have largely . particular, the research paper seeks the answers to the following research question: What is the relationship between teachers’ different corrective feedback types and students uptake and repair? This. illustrate the data analysis. 1.5. Significance of the study The study is conducted to find out the relationship between teachers’ corrective feedback types and students uptake and repairs. Hopefully,. different types of error. Secondly, the relationship between teachers’ corrective feedback types and students uptake and repair is given a close look to examine which types lead to the most amount