Treatment of students’ English oral errors at Shambu preparatory school: Grade 11 in focus

Abstract

The study was conducted in an attempt to investigate teachers’ treatment of students’ oral errors in EFL classes at Shambu Preparatory School. Descriptive survey design was used to investigate the major identified students’ oral errors, to find out the types of oral error treatments EFL teachers provide and to investigate the techniques they use to treat students’ oral errors. Interview and observation were used as instruments of data collection. The participants of the study were two English language teachers of grade 11 who were comprehensively selected to participate in interview and get their classes observed as well. The results indicated that there were 66 oral errors made by students which were categorized into 10 as pronunciation, tense, verb group, agreement, noun group, preposition, word order, article, wrong numbers and adjectives. The findings also showed 13 types of oral error treatments were made by the targeted teachers as provide, transfer, praise, explanation, question, interruption, acceptance, repetition, use of blackboard, ignore, negation and clues, prompt and criticism. Furthermore, it revealed that teachers used three techniques of oral error treatments as Teacher correction, Self correction and peer correction giving more room to teacher correction which is not pedagogically sound. Therefore, to alleviate the students’ linguistic problems, the targeted teachers are required to give appropriate oral error treatments. Besides, it would be better if the teachers give students the chance of self correction instead of playing the lion’s role by themselves

Keywords: Oral Error Mistake Utterance Shambu EFL teachers