“No” — A Case Study in Corrective Feedback in a Secondary Chinese Language Classroom in Australia

Corrective feedback has been studied for decades in classrooms both for children and adults. Among different subjects, language learning, especially second language (L2) learning is one of the significant targets of corrective feedback studies. Compared to English and other European languages, however, Chinese as L2 classroom has get little attention. This paper investigates what types of corrective feedback (CF) a teacher of Chinese working at a secondary school in Melbourne provided to what kinds of errors made by students, and the effectiveness of each CF type. The data was obtained from 2 random lessons and the parts involving CF were transcribed to further analyze. The results suggest that Chinese beginners made more mistakes in pronunciation and vocabulary than in grammar, however, the teacher provided feedback to all of the lexical and grammatical errors, ignoring nearly half of the phonological mistakes. In addition, the overall effectiveness of CF was not satisfactory, especially for elicitations and recasts, which were used the most commonly by the teacher. Some pedagogical implications for Chinese teaching and Chinese teacher training are also provided.