Teachers' Strategies of Correcting Grade 7 Students in Classroom Oral Reading

Abstract

The study focused on determining the proper way of correcting Grade 7 students in speaking the English language, as well as to identify the commonly committed errors of students being corrected by teachers and their objectives for correcting them. In this study, a descriptive qualitative research design was used, wherein five teachers were purposively chosen to undergo an in-depth interview. The results of the findings implied that teachers prefer to correct the students’ pronunciation, tone of voice and grouping of words. On the other hand, their purpose for correcting the students include: to help students learn English language easily, improve their reading and communication skills, expand their vocabulary knowledge, avoid other students commit the same mistake again, and to benefit in learning other subjects, since English is the medium of teaching used in most of the subjects. Meanwhile, the strategies used by teachers include explicit correction, repetition, metalinguistic clues, and paralinguistic signals. The researchers also found out that teachers did the correction immediately and in front of the class, and employed explicit correction in correcting them, delivering it in a calm manner, so it would not hurt their students’ feelings. For future researchers, they may include other criteria in oral reading, like pitch and stress, in conducting a study about commonly committed errors, as well as a study on error correction, which focuses on writing composition and grammar aspect. Also, they may include other teachers’ strategies in correcting, such as recast and clarification request. Moreover, this study may be used by researchers as a reference.