Abstract:
The main objective of this study was to investigate the teachers’ perception, students’
perception and satisfaction on the implementation of innovative ways of learner written
error correction in English Language Teaching (ELT) classes. The participants of this
study were 8 teachers and 259 students at Bako and Tibe Secondary Schools of the 2007
academic year. The researcher used descriptive survey method. For this purpose,
questionnaires (for both the teachers and students), interview for the teachers, and
corrected and returned students written documents were used as source of data gathering
instrument. The result of the study revealed that the practice of learner written error
correction is not innovative. Moreover, the task of giving correction to learner written
errors is not the teachers' regular classroom concern. The teachers quite dominantly use
teacher correction while other types of correction are employed rarely. They also use few
indirect techniques of correction than the direct ones. The study also indicated that the
teachers focus more on form and mechanics rather than content and organization when
correcting students' written works. Regarding the findings obtained, students lack of
getting written feedback regularly from their teacher, teachers are not using innovative
ways in correcting students’ written works, teachers are being selective when correcting;
they focus on form and mechanics drowned as a conclusions. Some of the
recommendation include: Teachers should be aware of the theoretical framework of providing correction in an innovative manner and other related areas; they should be
understood that correction is an aspect of teaching; they should employ the different
techniques of correction in a balanced manner; they should be provided with some
orientations so that they could do correction in an innovative way when responding to
their students' composition, etc.
