Exploring the Role of Occurring Errors Distribution in the Distribution of Corrective Feedback Targets

This study attempted to compare corrected linguistic errors in foreign language classrooms and all errors occurring in these classes to see which types of errors are more attended to by teachers in relation to their occurrence in classes. For this purpose, 69 hours of the classes of 34 teachers teaching in different language schools were recorded and the errors corrected by these teachers were identified and categorized into phonological, lexical, and grammatical types. The results of the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests indicated that the number of phonological errors being corrected was significantly higher than that of lexical errors. However, the results of similar analyses for the proportions of treated errors to occurring errors revealed that the differences among the three proportions were not significant, indicating that the three error types were addressed in accordance with the frequency with which they occurred in the classrooms. The findings can justify the differences in the findings of the studies on the comparison of error types being noticed by teachers and can have implications for future studies on the comparison of corrective feedback targets.