School of Languages at XJTLU Conference 2024

Corrective feedback in the ESL classroom has long been considered an important part of effective instruction by researchers and practitioners because it makes students recognize their errors and provides a chance for them to repair. However, teachers' corrective feedback can work as a double-edged sword. On one side, corrective feedback may promote immediate learner repair; on the other side, it may discourage students thus reducing their engagement. This "error correction paradox" may overwhelm teachers with concerns about whether they should correct students or not. Additionally, studies on error correction have been mainly focused on how teachers correct students' errors. Less attention has been paid to the "error correction paradox.' My study aims to fill this gap by analyzing the interactions between teachers and students in the classroom and investigating teachers' practice of corrective feedback. The database consists of 42 hours of video-recorded classroom interactions, comprising 23 hours of teachers interacting with adult students (aged 20-40). The collected data were transcribed and analyzed within the conversation analytic (CA) framework. The results of my study suggest that corrective feedback strategies that downgrade a teacher's expert status by displaying uncertainty, such as "I'm not sure..." and "I wonder...", may prompt students self-correction or peer-correction and avoid causing embarrassment to the adult students at the same time.