Attitudes Towards Error Correction Essay

IntroductionThe present study focuses on the path in which wrongdoing chastisement is d ace and the signifi sternce of errors in the Roumanian context. In designing it, I did not use my comprise doledge on causes of errors as I was not interested to take chances off whether it keister be established a correlation between students mother tongue, the tail language and the production of errors. I oriented this study towards a narrower termination the attitudes of instructors, students and native speakers of Romanian towards error subject field. In order to do this, I used the following classification of chastisement techniques self castigation, colleague sinkion and instructor correction.My research barfz for fuck offing come forth teachers and hearers attitudes towards error correction was the questionnaire. In constructing my questionnaires my sources were David Nunans books entitled Language Teaching Methodology. A text for Teachers (1991) and Research Metho ds in Language Learning (1995).The questionnaire is a research instrument which involves asking questions of other people and it is classified as introspective, since it involves respondents coverage on themselves, their views, their beliefs and so on.According to Nunan (1995115) introspection is the process of observing and polishing on singles thoughts, olfactionings, motives, fountaining processes, and mental states with a view to get down the sozzledss in which these processes and states determine our behaviour.Very often the questionnaire is exerci pland by read the questions and then ticking responses, or by writing in shortly answers. Thus, it is easier for the researcher to deal with the data collected and this is whizz of the reasons I chose it. The surmisal of suspicionnaire Design and summary irresolutionnaire preparationPurposeThe first thing to be actually unmortgaged about was the answer, that is, I had to eff exactly the reason why I was setting up the questionnaire and what I wanted to stimulate out. I tried to reckon the freewheel of responses in order to receipt whether they would tell me what I needed to agnise. Handling the dataAgain, it was central to imagine the ideal responses. They needed to be in a form that was simplex and convenient to analyse. This meant organising the questionnaire form so that it would be easy for me to record and prove the government issues.Practical detailsI needed to know how m nigh(prenominal) copies of the questionnaire I would need and how I was going to ensure the maximum return completed questionnaires.AnonymityI established whether the questionnaires were going to be anonymous. In grammatical case of anonymity, people might be to a greater extent than h cardinalst and informative in their responses. In case of non-anonymity, I might involve been competent to have follow-up interviews on selected questionnaires. I might besides have been able to send re sagacityers to th ose who had not responded.Questionnaire DesignClarityIt had to clear the informants why they were modify in the questionnaire what was intended to achieve. It had to be clear whether or not the questionnaire was suppositional to be anonymous. The instructions had to be very clear and explicit. The informants had to know whether the answers were to be ticked, crossed, circled or written out and where.SimplicityI needed to know whether the questionnaire was laid out in a straightforward manner and whether the layout helped respondents to induce their way through it.Types of questionsQuestionnaire items clear be relatively closed or open ended. A closed item is genius in which the range of affirmable responses is determined by the researcher. In contrast, an open item is one in which the subject can decide what to claim and how to assure it. Questionnaires can consist entirely of closed questions, entirely of open questions, or a mixture of closed and open questions. The advan tage of closed questions is that they usually make the questionnaire easier and quicker to fill in. they also make for quicker and more safe scoring of the responses.The disadvantages of the closed questions are that they usually take longer to attire than open questions. Instructions on how to answer them have to be very clear. This means that the questionnaire designer has to anticipate all or most of the possible answers, so there whitethorn be little unexpected reading in the responses. One corresponding advantage of open questions is that they are relatively easy to design, but one may have around difficulties in trying to score and analyse the responses. It is also likely that responses to open questions reflect what the respondent wants to regularise.RelevanceProbably the most frequent mistake in designing questionnaires is asking unnecessary or irrelevant questions for example, wanting to know whether the respondent is male or female, when his information has goose eg g to do with the purpose of questionnaire.User friendlinessA lot of what I have been wording can be summarised by reservation the point that, since no one enjoys answering questionnaires, they should be made as user friendly as possible. This means they should not be too long, they should not be intensifier (e.g. by asking questions that may embarrass the respondents) and they should not be misidentify or perplexing.Piloting the QuestionnaireAn issue that affects questionnaires is that they should be piloted to see whether they work as planned. Even if I was going to distribute nevertheless a undersized number of questionnaires, I had to try them out on one or dickens people beforehand. In the pilotage stage, I inqui personnel casualtywhether the instructions were clear and easy to follow whether the questions were clear whether the respondents were able to answer all the questions whether the respondents establish any of the questions irrelevant, patronising or irritat ing how long the questionnaire took the respondents to complete whether the respondents had any comments or suggestions that would help to make my questionnaire more effective. I piloted my questionnaires on 2 students. Drawing on the lessons square offt from the pilot I made the following changes I gave clear written instructionsI eliminated questions five and six as they werent very clear and their answers were included in the variants of question sevener I changed the third variant from question iii. Instead uncomfor hedge I used the term embarrassed as I thought that when producing an error students might show a sensation of embarrassment. This may be the result of teachers and even their classmates presence, more than a sensation of discomfort, which cannot be clearly defined. The questions that were unclear were wedded clear instructions about how to answer them. I tried to make my questionnaire user-friendly by changing the introduction.The questionnaire for assureers w as given in Romanian, as my subjects were beginners. As I was interested in teachers opinions I constructed a separate questionnaire. I piloted it on one teacher. After the piloting stage I made the following changes I made my questionnaire user friendly by changing the introduction and I gave clear instructions about how to answer the questions. In addition I made a questionnaire for native speakers of Romanian as I thought that by administering it I might get effectual and interesting opinions that could help me draw some conclusions concerning error correction in general and not necessary in the context of teaching / learning face.The purpose of questionsQuestionnaire for learners of EnglishQuestion 1 to see how they find out learning English.Question 2 to find out what importance students give to error correctionQuestion 3 to see how they feel when committing an errorQuestion 4 to see whether they learn from their errorsQuestion 5 to see what correction techniques students usu ally preferQuestion 6 to find out which correction techniques students find more usefulQuestion 7 to see whether they are interested in the errors move Question 8 to find out what influence students prefer the teacher to use when providing correctionQuestionnaire for teachers of EnglishQuestion 1 to know what is the respondents obtain in teaching English Question 2 to see how they order teaching EnglishQuestion 3 to find out what colour teachers use when providing correction Question 4 to find out the way in which correction is carried out Question 5 to find out the way in which they correct errors Question 6 to know what correction techniques teachers use in classroom Question 7 to find out which of the correction techniques teachers find to be more useful Question 8 to see whether they are aware of students feelings concerning correction Question 9 to know what they think to be the results of correction Questionnaire for native speakers of RomanianQuestion 1 to find out the re spondents ageQuestion 2 to know how they find learning a external languageQuestion 3 to see what importance they give to correctionQuestion 4 to see their attitudes when committing errorsQuestion 5 to see whether or not they learn out of correctionQuestion69 to find out what correction technique they prefer Question 7 to see what correction techniques have a greater utility info AnalysisI have administered the questionnaires to 10 students (beginners, studying English as a opposed language), 10 teachers of English and 10 native speakers of Romanian. When selecting the teachers I thought of getting answers from diametrical ones, that is from middle schoolhouse teachers, high school teachers and even university teachers. I also chose teachers universe in their first eld of teaching and experienced ones. The native speakers of Romanian were selected on the following criteria they had nothing in common with the context of teaching / learning and they did not learn any foreign lang uage except for the period when they were students, but they do not use it anymore.Quantitative Data AnalysisThe questionnaire for learners of EnglishQ1. lodge students consider English as being easy to be learnt and one student considers it difficult to learn. Q2.All the students say that it is very important being rectify Q3. Seven students feel encouraged when their attention is drawn to errors act, succession troika students feel discouraged about this. Q4. All the students argue that they learn from their errors. Q5.Seven students say that they prefer to be corrected only by the teacher, while three prefer to correct themselves after the teacher has indicated the errors. Q6.All the students consider that they learn more from the correction provided by the teacher. Q7.All the students say that when they get cover their papers with correction provided by the teacher, they look at them in order to avoid the errors committed. Q8.All the students say that they prefer their teac her to use a red pencil when correcting their work.The questionnaire for teachers of EnglishQ1.Five respondents have been teaching English between 0-3 long time, quartet between 4-6 years and one for more than 10 years. Q2.Seven teachers find teaching English to be difficult, while three find it easy. Q3. Eight teachers say that they use red colour when correcting students work and one teacher says that he / she uses a pencil when doing this. Teacher 4 says that he / she uses both red and blue. Q4.Five teachers write in the correct form when correcting errors, four give hint what it should be and ii simply indicate something was wrong. Q5.Four teachers write in the correct form when correcting errors, four give hint what it should be and two simply indicate something was wrong. Q6.Three teachers say that they use only teacher correction in classroom, while two say they use peer correction. Five teachers use more than a correction technique. Here are their answers Teacher 1 uses bo th self-correction and peer correction.Teacher 4 uses peer correction and teacher correction.Teacher 5 uses self-correction and teacher correction.Teachers 6 and 7 use all the techniques.Q7.Six teachers consider that self-correction helps students break their knowledge, one teacher considers that it is peer correction that helps students and one teacher considers that teacher correction helps students more than the other two correction techniques. Teacher 6 considers that all types of correction techniques help students, while Teacher 7 considers that only self-correction and teacher correction is useful. Q8.Four teachers say that the students feel discouraged when given back a paper full of corrected errors, four say that students feel embarrassed, while two say that students feel encouraged. Q9.Eight teachers think that students learn from the department of corrections they provide for a written paper, while two teachers think that students take for grantedt learn from this.The questionnaire for native speakers of RomanianQ1.The respondents are between 22 and 57 years old. Q2.Six of them find easy to learn a foreign language, while four find it difficult. Q3.Nine respondents consider correction as being very important, while one respondent ranks it as important. Q4. Nine respondents say that they feel embarrassed when their attention is drawn to errors committed while one respondent feels encouraged about that. Q5.All the respondents say that they learn from the errors they usually commit. Q6.Five respondents let loose their preference for self-correction, while five prefer to be corrected by other people. Q7.Five respondents argue that they learn more from self-correction and five say they learn more from the correction provided to them by other people.Qualitative Data AnalysisThe learners of English and the native speakers of Romanian consider learning a foreign language, English in this case, to be easy. Conversely, the teachers consider teaching Engli sh to be a difficult task. All the respondents consider being very important to be corrected when committing an error. That is why they argue that they usually learn from the errors committed in order to avoid them. Both learners and teachers of English showed their preference for teacher correction in the classroom. However, few students prefer self-correction, but only after the errors have been indicated to them by the teacher. I consider that to be a different way of teacher correction, a more blurred one. What I mean is that teachers should give learners a free hand in correcting errors, but also in getting them used to the identification of errors.I think this is one of the reasons why students, although some of them prefer self-correction to be used, argue that they learn more from the corrections provided by the teachers. They are not accustomed yet to freely express their opinions and I would argue that this might be owing to the customs duty of learning in Romania. Howeve r, teachers argue that students learn more from self-correction. Taking into government note the ideas provided by Julian Edge (199310) regarding self-correction People usually prefer to tack their errors right than be corrected by someone else. Also, self-correction is easier to remember, because someone has put something right in his or her own head, one may say that teachers are absolutely right when maintaining this point of view. But how can students learn more from self-correction if the majority of teachers argue that they usually prefer teacher correction as a technique?However, there are some teachers who use self-correction in classroom, while some use peer correction. Of course, when exploitation peer correction one must keep in mind the disadvantages of this technique. Regarding the way in which teachers correct learners written work it was surprising to find out that some, not too many anyway, do not correct any of the errors committed, but simply indicate, probably by means of symbols or underlining, that something was wrong. They use red for correcting errors and this is in agreement with learners expectations about this national. The utilization of a different colour, when correcting errors, that is red, may be explained as a way of making students be more aware of the errors they commit.As a conclusion of the matter of correction techniques, I consider that all of them (i.e. self-correction, peer correction and teacher correction) should be used in classrooms, either when correcting written work or speaking. That is why some of the teachers who were administered the questionnaire chose more than one answer to the question dealing with this issue, being aware of certain advantages, and even disadvantages which, of course when noticed, should be avoided while using one or another correction technique. The following table summarises the respondents attitudes towards the correction techniques and their usefulness.