The focus is the preferences of learners. These key questions will be adopted in the research: Should the learners’ errors be corrected? What kind of errors should be corrected and what kind of errors can be ignored in class? When should error correction happen? Who should be the one to give the corrective feedback? How can the errors be corrected properly without hurting the learners’ feeling? These questions have been discussed by linguists and teachers for a long time, but in this research, the learners’ opinion will be valued a lot. There will be a comparison between learners’ expectation and the teachers’ opinion as well as their behaviors.
2. Literature review
In order to figure out and classify students’ preferences toward English classroom error correction, necessary review and discussion should be given first. This part will show the definitions of error and mistake, also, some analysis as well as some strategies for error correction.
2.1 The Definition of Error
There are a lot of definitions about “error”. A definition from Cai Shaoqin (2009) goes that language errors are those forms that native speakers don’t use under the certain circumstances. And according to Wikipedia, generally speaking, if there is a deviation in grammar, syntax, pronunciation or punctuation between the user and the standard language norms, people consider it as an error (Error, 2014). In other words, a language form being different from the “correct forms” is an error. In this paper, the author narrows down the area of “correct form” to “the forms accepted by the national examination system”. Errors usually occur due to the incorrect understanding or unpracticed using of the standard form. Learners usually cannot correct the errors by themselves.