Oral Corrective Feedback in the Chinese EFL Classroom : Methods employed by teachers to give feedback to their students

Abstract: This is an empirical study based on English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' experiences. The study is on Chinese EFL teachers’ usage of different oral corrective feedback (OCF) types as well as their own beliefs as to what strategies they make use of most frequently and what they do to improve their own OCF. Semi-structured interviews and non-participant observations were employed as instruments for the data collecting process. Four Chinese EFL teachers were interviewed, one male and three female, with varied amounts of professional experience and of different ages. Four observations were made in the classrooms of the same teachers as a supplement to the interviews. The interviews were analyzed by means of content analysis. The results indicate that Recast is the most commonly used feedback method and that the teachers had different thoughts on which feedback method was the most effective or the one they most frequently used. Furthermore, the results indicate that there are differences between teachers’ beliefs about their feedback strategies and the observation results.