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Few issues in second language teaching have generated as much controversy as that of error correction. In fact, one of the most discouraging experiences of L2 teachers is correcting errors especially those that recur in their students’ production. A possible explanation may be the mismatch between what teachers and students consider to be effective feedback on error correction. Although much has been published on error taxonomies, detection, analysis and evaluation, there is a dearth of research studies comparing teachers’ and students’ perceptions. This article endeavours to help fill this void. The study involved 21 informants. Eleven of them were undergraduate students who had no teaching experience or qualifications, whereas the other 10 were qualified teachers of English as a foreign language with between three and 13 years’ experience. After watching an excerpt from a commercially produced teaching video twice, the participants were asked to detect the error-correction moves made by the teacher, classify them, judge their efficiency and record their opinions individually and in groups. The results indicated that a significant percentage of the teacher’s error-correction moves went unnoticed. Teachers and students agreed that the most efficient corrections occurred when more time, longer explanations, and use of different correction strategies were utilised.
