Oral Corrective Feedback: Examining Teacher- Initiated Correction of CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) Learners’ Pronunciation Errors

This paper examines oral corrective feedback strategies in regard to pronunciation errors in a Chinese foreign language classroom. Traditional oral corrective feedback typologies (Lyster and Ranta 1997; Ellis and Sheen 2006; Sheen 2011) have been combined with Chinese pronunciation teaching methods and investigated in a case study conducted at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. Two sessions of first year Chinese language laboratory classes were observed and recorded. The qualitative data analysis was carried out in two stages. First, traditional oral corrective feedback typologies were applied to the collected material in order to find out which types of corrective feedback were used (deductive analysis). The results revealed that corrective feedback on pronunciation errors are mostly given in an explicit manner. Therefore, as a second step, a differentiated typology of explicit correction was developed (inductive analysis). The main findings of this study are that pronunciation errors in a Chinese foreign language classroom are corrected explicitly and treated with methods of 1) explication, 2) comparison, and 3) reduction. The explicitness of these methods is further enhanced by 1) paralinguistic cues (stress, speech rate modification), 2) visualisations (gestures) and 3) additional verbalisation.