2. Literature review 2

    2.1 The Definition of Error 2

    2.2 The Classification of Errors 2

    2.2.1 Pre-systematic Error, Systematic Error, and Post-systematic Error 2

    2.2.2 Intra-lingual Error, Inter-lingual Error, and Induced Error 3

    2.2.3 Other Ways of Classifying 3

    2.3 Error Correction 3

    2.3.1 Different Attitudes toward Error and Error Correction 4

    2.3.2 What Kind of Errors Should be Corrected? 5

    2.3.3 Strategies of Classroom Error Correction 5

3. Research Methods 8

4. Findings 9

    4.1 Should Errors be Corrected? 9

    4.2 What Kind of Errors Should be Corrected? 10

    4.3 When Should the Errors be Corrected? 11

    4.4 Who Should Do the Error Correction? 11

    4.5 How to Correct Language Errors in English Class? 12

    4.6 Students’ Preferences and The Real Situation in Their English Class 13

5. Discussion 14

References 15

1. Introduction“To err is human; to forgive pine.” these words of Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism go for language learning: to learn a language is to make errors. Making errors is unavoidable for learners in language learning, especially during the process of the second language acquisition (SLA). To deal with these errors well requires the educators to know error and the strategies of error correction first. Linguists, educationist and other researchers, such as Corder, Brown, Burt, Ellis and so on, have been discussing these topics for many years. Ideas of different researchers are always quite different. However, with all these authoritative talks, there should only be a few researches focus on the main participant of classroom teaching: students (Kazemi et al., 2013).

According to the academic trend on CNKI, this topic has been paid a lot of attention to especially since 2007, and in2011, it reached a peak. However, most of them are written in a perspective of teachers and linguists. The preferences of learners are not investigated a lot. But as a matter of fact, the learners’ attitude may influence their interests, motivation and confidence in second language learning. 

As we know, China is a country with a great many of students learning English now, and it’s also a country with an interesting culture in China named "Mianzi"(face). People care about their face, including kids and adolescent. This makes the error correction in classroom teaching become more difficult and controversial (Zhong, 2012). That’s why this paper is aimed at introducing basic theory about error correction, and to find out the preferences of the junior high school students toward classroom error correction, so that some suggestions can be put forward.

In this paper, some theories related to error classification and error correction will be reviewed and the error correction in classroom teaching for Chinese ESL learners in junior high school will be discussed.