Perceptions of Oral Errors and Their Corrective Feedback: Teachers vs. Students

Being interested in the whole process of teaching and learning a language, researchers and linguists have attempted to describe what errors and corrective feedback are, which together form an inevitable and indispensable part of instructed second and foreign language acquisition (Hendrickson, 1987). They have tried to define them in order to help learners and teachers in dealing with deviant forms that occur during speaking activities in the foreign language classroom (Nunan, 1996). Moreover, when it comes to error correction, one should not forget about a range of decisions that need to be taken into account after having noticed an error in a student’s utterance (Long, 1977). As a consequence, explaining errors and proposing the ways of rectifying incorrect forms during speaking play a vital role in students’ successes in language learning and teachers’ practices. The major aim of this paper is to report and compare teachers’ and students’ perceptions of oral errors and their corrective feedback as an inseparable part of language acquisition. The participants of the study were 43 secondary school teachers and 250 learners of English as a foreign language, who filled out questionnaires and were observed in real-life situations occurring in the language classroom. As regards the decision-making process and corrective feed-back, the analysis of the data revealed both differences and similarities in the opinions of the two groups of respondents in comparison with the actual classroom conditions, which indicate that correcting students’ erroneous forms is a complex issue meriting further investigation and consideration.