Oral Corrective Feedback An Exploratory Case Study Of The Interplay Between Teachers Beliefs Classroom Practices And Rationales

There is compelling evidence to indicate that the English proficiency of pre-service trainees atrnthe English Department of the Addis Ababa University is plummeting. They join university withrnsuch poor English that it is almost impossible to raise it to the required level during the threernyears they stay here to complete their studies for a bachelor’s degree. It is these graduates of thernDepartment that are deployed in the high schools as well as colleges and universities of therncountry as English teachers.rnThere are obviously several reasons why the trainees join higher learning institutions with veryrnlittle English. The objective of this study was to look more closely into a specific factor in thernway teachers in high schools teach the language. More specifically, it aimed to explore thernmanner in which four high school teachers in public schools in Addis Ababa treated theirrnstudents’ oral errors in the English classroom. Twenty-three lessons were video-recorded in theirrnnatural setting before the teachers were interviewed to indirectly elicit their beliefs on the topicrnof oral corrective feedback. After the in-depth interview with each teacher, the correctivernfeedback episodes in the recorded data were identified and classified using a slightly modifiedrnmodel of Lyster and Ranta (1997); some of these episodes were, then, shown to the respectivernteachers to help them recall and reflect on what exactly happened and why they reacted to theirrnstudents’ errors the way they did. Their rationales were subsequently audio-recorded andrntranscribed. Moreover, four teacher trainers from the English Department of the Addis AbabarnUniversity were interviewed with the intent of finding out how these teachers had been trained torndeal with students’ oral errors in the first place. The material these trainers used in relation to therntopic at hand was also scrutinized to corroborate the information gathered from both the teachersrnand the trainers.rnAnalyses of the data showed that the trainees did not have a firm theoretical ground on whichrnthey based their actions. Rather, they reacted to their students’ errors based on what theyrnintuitively felt was right or they treated errors the way their own teachers treated their errorsrnwhen 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 thatrnthe trainers were not up-to-date with the current literature on the issue and had very divergentrnviews. The material they used was found to be scanty and lacking in coherence. It is, therefore,rnrecommended that trainees’ English proficiency be an important criterion before they arernadmitted into the teaching profession, that trainers keep themselves abreast of the currentrndevelopments in the area and upgrade the material they are using for the training, and that shorttermrntrainings be organized for English teachers at all levels to help them raise the level of theirrnproficiency in English in general as well as to expose them to more recent theories of languagernlearning/teaching so that they can experiment with newer ways of dealing with students’ oral errors

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