Teachers' Feedback on Student Errors in EFL Classrooms: An Analysis

This report examines the critical role of teacher feedback in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, focusing on how teachers respond to student errors. The report begins with an introduction to the significance of error correction in language learning and provides a review of relevant literature, including definitions of key terms and previous research on error types and teacher feedback mechanisms. It then summarizes a specific video lesson, detailing the teacher's approach to addressing student errors, which is followed by an evaluation and analysis of the distribution of student error types (grammatical, lexical, phonological, and pragmatic) and teacher response types (reformulations and prompts). The analysis explores the relationship between the types of errors made by students and the feedback strategies employed by the teacher, using examples from the video lesson to illustrate these connections. The report concludes by summarizing the impact of teacher responses on student learning outcomes and the importance of effective feedback in fostering a positive and productive EFL classroom environment.

Discussion of teachers’ feedback to students’ errors in EFL
classroom
1. Introduction 300
Like a child learning a mother tongue, any learner will inevitably
experience some language errors while learning a second language.
In the 1950s, "error" was once regarded as a failure in language
learning. It seems that once a learner makes a mistake in practice,
he is a failure. However, with the further development of linguistics,
pedagogy and psychology, people changed their opinions on "error".
To date, correcting "errors" made by learners in second language
acquisition has been considered as an important way to help
students succeed in language learning.
Teachers, as the instructors of teaching activities, undoubtedly play
a crucial guiding role in the students' learning. At the same time,
teachers also must have a clear understanding of errors made by
students and be good at classifying these problems, which helps
students to correct errors on EFL classroom. Lyster (1997) claims
that teachers’ corrective response can increase students’ uptake,
which shows the importance of teachers’ feedback.
This assignment includes six parts. The first part is a brief
introduction to students’ errors and teachers’ feedback. The second
part composes a review of previous researches and definitions of
key terms. In the third part, this assignment summarizes the
proposes and content of the video lesson. After that, in the fourth
part, it focusses on the distribution of students’ error types and
teachers’ response type and attempts to find relationship between
them. The fifth part is a brief conclusion of the effects of teachers’
response and the last part is references.
2. Literature review 400
2.1 Students’ errors200

Researchers holds different opinions on the definition of “error”. Corder (1967) is a pioneer in
making a definition of “error”. In the article “The Significance of Learners’ Errors”, he contrasts
the “error” with the “mistake”. According to his theory, errors are deviations of language using
which can indicate learners’ learning states. However, mistakes are wrong language productions
made by learners which are related to “processing failures (Corder, 1967:167)” such as learners’
memory or condition. Allwright and Bailey (1991: 84) further develops this theory and states that
errors are “production of a linguistic form that deviates from the correct form”. Brown (1994:205)
also claims that errors are deviations form native speakers’ grammar rules.
There are different types of students’ errors and Lyster and Ranta (1997) divide these errors into
four categories: phonological, grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic error. 1) Phonological error
refers to the incorrect pronunciation and intonation of words which may be caused by improper
stress or incorrect pronunciation of syllables. 2) grammatical error refers to wrong structures of
sentences which are against grammar rules. 3) lexical error refers to improper use of words in the
content, such as inaccurate use of synonym, which may be caused by misunderstanding of
meanings and usages of words. 4) pragmatic error refers to expressions which are not used by
native-speakers but are grammatical right.
2.2 Teachers’ feedback200
Teacher’s feedback is an important method for student to recognize the rightness of their answers
and there are many kinds of feedback classification. Considering the function of feedback, Nunan
(1991) suggests that feedback can be divided into positive feedback and negative feedback.
Positive feedback refers that the teacher uses positive judgements to encourage students, while
negative feedback refers that the teacher uses different methods to tell students their errors and
helps them to correct. Based on this classification, Carroll and Swain (1993) further divided
negative feedback into two subcategories: explicit negative feedback and implicit negative
feedback. Negative feedback can also be called corrective feedback, which is most frequently used
in EFL class.
In a research of teacher-student interaction, Lyster and Ranta (1997) summarized six types of
teachers’ feedback to students’ error by observing several French lessons. These feedbacks are 1)
explicit correction. 2) recasts. 3) clarification requests. 4) metalinguistic feedback. 5) elicitation.
6) repetition. In 2007, Ranta and Lyster summed up these six categories into two broad categories:
reformulations and prompts. The first four types of feedback can be classified into reformulations
and the last two types of feedback can be classified in to prompts.
Do 3,4,5 sections total 1300words need 5 references

3. Summary of the lesson 300
The lesson begins with the teacher introducing the lesson topic to the students;
students grievances. The teacher takes the question-answer approach to carry out the
lesson objectives. As this is a language class, the educator deliberately starts with the
most basic thing which is defining the terms used in the topic. The students give their
understanding of the name which is made from grief and settles on a simple definition
that a grievance is a complaint.
The trainer goes on to distribute a handout which has several pages. The learners
are given a four minutes window period to discuss the questions in groups of threes
and some in pairs. After the four minutes elapse, the professor asks feedback from
several of the class members (Wang & Selby, 2017). The first question is about
personal future, and a student by the name of David explains that shortly he wants to
be studying at a UK university. The second question is about the challenges that
students face while they are learning especially international students. One of the
scholars responds that students face homesick and accommodation problems as they
are studying far off country from home. Also, students describe the school fees paid
by international scholars as an astronomical fee or excessive fees.
Students are given chances to spell the words as they interact in class. For
instance, the word “harsh” is spelled in class. Also, there is a picture with a caption,
and the lecturer asks one of the students to translate it to the rest of the class members.
One of the key things to note from this lesson is the practice of indicating and
differentiating parts of speech. For example, when the word discriminate is
mentioned, the class goes further into determining the proposition it uses and its form
as a noun.

Learners have a perfect opportunity to explain in class a picture they have been
presented with. The teacher takes this chance to guide them through as he asks
synonyms of words like an obligation. As the class ends, they discuss the comparison
of UK GDP with other four European countries. Then they conclude that regarding
education, one would need at least $12,000 to get an education in the UK, which is
way high compared to countries like Finland.
4. Evaluation and analysis 800’ (pls refer the example file)
4.1 Distribution of student error types250
Student’s Errors
Grammatical
Errors
Proportion Lexical
Errors
Proportion Phonological
Errors
Proportion Pragmatic
Errors
Proportion
9 33% 5 18% 6 22% 7 29%
1. Phonological error refers to the incorrect pronunciation and intonation of
words which may be caused by improper stress or incorrect pronunciation of
syllables.
2. Grammatical error refers to wrong structures of sentences which are against
grammar rules.
3. Lexical error refers to improper use of words in the content, such as inaccurate
use of synonym, which may be caused by misunderstanding of meanings and
usages of words.
4. Pragmatic error refers to expressions which are not used by native-speakers
but are grammatical right (Steinberg & Kraft, 2017).
From the above table, we can deduce the following;
Grammatical errors account for slightly higher than 33% of the errors made by
the students.
Lexical errors on the other hand, are the least errors committed by students.
In terms of significance, there is no much difference between the highest
committed errors and the least committed.
This being class comprising of international students, pragmatic errors have

accounted for a significant percentage.
4.2 Distribution of teacher response types250
Most researchers consider teacher correction a central practice in EFL and ESL
contexts and have proved its effectiveness. Teacher feedback is more effective for
improving grammatical errors than peer or self-correction. Affective factors are also
important in the success of feedback and studies suggest that students have a
preference for teacher feedback over other types (Luciana, 2017). The table below
shows the different types of teacher’s feedback to student’s errors;
Teacher’s feedback to students errors
Reformulations Prompts
Explicit
Corrections
% Recasts % Clarification
Requests
% Metalinguistic % Elicitation % Repetition %
6 22 3 11 2 7 5 18 4 14 7 29
From the table above, we can conclude that;
Repetition account for the highest percentage of the teacher’s feedback. This
might be due to differences in pronunciations and the fact that this is an
international class and thus it’s made of people who don’t have the same
accent.
Very few instances has been shown where the trainer was requested to clarify
a given idea or point. All students seemed to have a rough idea of what they
were being taught.
Explicit, repetition and metalinguistic formed the dominant part of the
response to student’s errors from the lecturer.

4.3 Relationship between error type and response
type300
To demonstrate the relationship between the error types and the response types used
by the trainer, I am going to pick out illustrations from lesson six video.
In the first instance, when the tutor asks the members of the class the synonym to the
word obligations. Everyone seemed to give the wrong answer. However, the teacher,
without correcting the error that occurred, continued to pose another question asking
for further information, which indicates that the teacher is interested in the student’s
answer. Thus, the interaction goes beyond the original question and answer. Finally,
he even constructs a sentence and leaves a gap so that it is easier for the student’s to
fill in.
Another instance, happens when the trainer ask the students to describe what they can
see on the images provided. Further the learners are made to compare the images in
terms of age, gender, countries and so on.
The trainer is keen to ask the members of the class to group themselves and discuss
the questions. The first time they group is at the beginning of the lesson where they
have to group themselves into groups of three students and duos in each group. They

are then to discuss the three questions provided and share with the rest of the class.
The second occurrence where the professor asks the students to group themselves is
when he provides them with two different images with people who seem to be in a
protest. The students are to discuss their observations in groups and then pick a
representative to make a presentation to the class members. This specific trainer is
concerned with how the students spell words, whether they know the synonyms or the
prepositions that go with particular nouns. At times, the trainer prompts some students
to give their take on the topic. The teacher is inquisitive and if a student answers in a
certain unexpected way, he asks a follow-up question giving the student the chance to
offer a clarification.
As the lesson comes to an end, we see the trainer interested in helping the student
decide the most affordable country to be a student in. This the teacher achieves by
comparing these nations’ GDP. He initiates the concept by explaining GDP to the
class. GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product and is the value obtained after a
country’s wealth is divided by its population. The GDP of four other counties are
compared with that of the UK.
On all the errors committed by the students, the trainers corrected them by use of
positive feedback (Liu & Ding, 2015). Not really telling the student is wrong but
rather asking them to explain and give more information on the same.

5. Conclusion 200
To sum it up, the teacher-learner interaction becomes fruitful depending on how
the trainer responds to their students. The approach taken for instance by the teacher
in lesson six, is one where students start from the simple known things to complex
stuff that require more understanding. The trainer indicates every important point, for
instance all parts of speech are well noted on the board as this is a language lesson.
To minimize the errors, the teacher has taken the approach of giving the student’s
time to fully participate in the class. It’s more of a class discussion that it is a lecture.
Students are given a chance to state whether the word on board is a noun or an
adjective and if it’s the latter, they name other forms of the word.
With a manageable number of students and minimum distractions, a committed
lecturer who involves all the learners, then the learning of a foreign language as a
second language is made even easier (Farshi & Safa, 2015). Student’s errors are
greatly minimized when there is a tutor to guide the learners through the learning
process. In my view, more structured lessons should be introduced to help learns learn
a single concept at a given sitting.
6. Reference
Farshi, S. S., & Safa, S. K. (2015). The Effect of Two Types of Corrective Feedback on
EFL Learners' Writing Skill. Advances In Language And Literary Studies, 6(1), 26-30.
Liu, Y., & Ding, S. (2015). THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHERS' QUESTIONING AND
FEEDBACK ON STUDENTS' AFFECT IN THE INTERACTION OF EFL
CLASSROOM. International Journal Of Arts & Sciences, 8(8), 467.

Luciana, P. (2017). Dealing with Students’ Errors: Oral Corrective Feedback in the Italian
EFL Classroom. Altre Modernità, Vol 0, Iss 0, Pp 98-117 (2017), (0), 98.
doi:10.13130/2035-7680/8305
Steinberg, M. P., & Kraft, M. A. (2017). The Sensitivity of Teacher Performance Ratings to
the Design of Teacher Evaluation Systems. Educational Researcher, 46(7), 378.
doi:10.3102/0013189X17726752
Wang, J., & Selby, K. L. (2017). Combining reading quizzes and error analysis to motivate
students to grow. Education, (4), 418.
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