A Study On English Teachers’ Feedback In Primary School

This study focuses on types and distributions of English teacher’s feedbacks in primary school, summarizes its features and explores the solutions for the existing problems or defects in teachers’feedbacks, in the hope that English teachers can pay more attention on feedbacks in classroom teaching. Teacher feedback refers to teacher follower-up discourse in teaching classes. It includes verbal feedback and nonverbal feedback. And in primary schools, English teaching is mainly launched and carried forward by a serious of discourses including teachers’ initiation, students’response and teachers’follow-up. As an important part of the class discourse, teachers’feedback not only gives replies to a learner’s response, but also embodies the class interaction effect and promotes the conversation in the right direction. Especially, at students’enlightening stage, teachers feedback is vital to demonstrate standard English, cultivate students’interests in English and strengthen students’ learning initiative participation. However, since there is no study of teachers’feedback in primary school English class with the practical-oriented primary resource, this study is a timely answer to EFL teaching summary and category in elementary teaching in China.Methodologically, classroom observation and pre-interview are two basic research instruments in this study in order to know the basic information about the subject teachers and make audio-recording transcripts. Participants in this study are teachers and learners from a university affiliated elementary school which holds relatively more advanced teaching resources and higher teaching levels. Through three months of classroom observation, the author collected more than460minutes classes videos from eight English teachers’classes involving all six grades. After analysis and summary of the data, the main findings of this study can be concluded into four parts:Firstly, thirteen sub-types of English teachers’feedback in primary school were summarized in this study based on three general categories:positive feedback, negative feedback, nonverbal feedback. Those sub-types can be arranged in accordance with the using frequency, from the most commonly used to the least are as follows:simple positive feedback, confirming repetition, giving awards, no feedback, feedback with more information, explicit correction, hint feedback, recast, reward feedback, doubted repetition, facial expression, hand gestures and head movement.Secondly, the proportions of positive feedback and nonverbal feedback are higher in the lower grades than in the higher grades, while negative feedback holds the opposite trend.Thirdly, foreign English teachers in primary school are more likely to use nonverbal feedback and explicit correction. And giving awards and reward feedback are two usual ways for Chinese English teachers to give feedbacks, especially in lower grades.Fourthly, even though in this advanced educational English school, there are still some problems of teachers’feedback, such as no feedback existing in every grades, losing control when using giving awards, lack of nonverbal feedback in higher grades and no creative feedback on group works ect.In short, teachers in the investigated primary school have paid high attention on teacher talk in classroom teaching, and generally use supportive and interactive feedbacks towards students responses, which can improve students’output extraordinarily. However, there are still some problems:like tone and accent troubles, grammatical mistakes. And different teachers hold relatively large difference in English ability, which causes communication obstruction with students especially for teachers with lower English level. With keeping improving English and holding high sensitivity of various feedback strategies, English teachers can improve class interaction and encourage more opportunities for the students to open their mouth to speak English so that the students can gain the proper evaluations, which overall promote the quality and quantity of targeted languages.