Effective Teacher's Feedback As Perceived By Chinese College Students

When a teacher stands before the class, he or she may not clearly realize his or her power of applying a movement or uttering a word. Nevertheless, a teacher's feedback, either verbal or nonverbal, has a great influence on the students in their learning process. It is acknowledged that effective teacher's feedback can greatly motivate students to learn and guide them to learn more efficiently.Owing to the important role of teacher's feedback in the school setting, the author feels the urge to have a tentative look at the effective teacher's feedback in language learning. The focus of the article is to identify the effective teacher's feedback perceived by Chinese college students through investigation and accordingly explore how a teacher can successfully provide such effective teacher's feedback.The second part of the paper is concerned with the description and analysis of the investigation results. The research method includes questionnaires and interviews. The subjects are the Chinese college students and the English teachers in six different universities- East China Normal University, East China Law and Politics University, Tongji University, Shanghai Technological and Industrial University, Zhengzhou University and Putian University. The reason for the investigation to be conducted in various universities is to make the investigation results more representative.From the investigation, we can see that (a) Both the students and teachers affirm the importance of teacher's feedback in language learning; (b) The characteristics of the effective teacher's feedback are said to be informational, constructive, regular and sincere; (c) The students believe that the most important characteristics of a motivating teacher are that he or she should first of all has adequate understanding of the student and should possess teaching qualifications, (d) The student-perceived effective feedback types include both verbal and nonverbal. Altogether, the research has investigated the one-word praise, instructional feedback, group-oriented verbal feedback, critical informational feedback, eye contact, expression, gesture and posture, and proximityi. (e) The underachieving students are the group who are in a special need of teacher's feedback and due attention. Through the means of questionnaire and interview, we can see that teacher's feedback seems to have a bigger influence upon these students than average ones yet the teachers more than often give them even less attention and feedback. To sum up, the investigation not only tells what kind of feedback is needed but also identifies the deficiency on teacher's side. In other words, the findings show the gap between the quality of currentteacher's feedback and that of effective teacher's feedback perceived by students in English class.Then the third part of the paper comes naturally to an analysis of the causes for the unsatisfactory teacher's feedback practice and a proposal for the possible solutions. There are at least three barriers on the road to successful student-centered teacher's feedback provision - the oversize of the class, the overwork of the teacher and teacher's deficient psychological knowledge. Thus, based on the findings of the author's investigation, the paper continues with the proposal for realizing the effective teacher's feedback provision in English class. The paper mainly discusses the possible improvement that schools, teachers and researchers could do in the future. As for the efforts that schools and teachers can make, the paper concludes the following five factors, (a) Schools need to control the scale of English class and make it manageable to teachers, (b) Schools need to guarantee the teacher's proper working hours and pleasant working conditions so that teachers can afford the time to improve the quality of teacher's feedback (c) Schools and teachers need to strengthen the training on current Chinese youth psychology so as to acquire the overall understanding of the student, (d) Teachers need to be culturally sensitive so that they can respon...