The Appropriateness Analysis Of Teachers’ Verbal Feedback In Secondary English Classroom

According to the discourse structure of teacher talk, Birmingham divides the classroom discourse into teachers’initiation, students’response and teachers’feedback. Teachers’feedback discourse refers to teachers’verbal feedback on students’response to the questions. Based on the different focuses, teachers’verbal feedback is classified into three categories, that’s content feedback, form feedback and theme feedback. From the perspective of language teaching, this study is to investigate the distribution, the way and the frequency of the teachers’verbal feedback in middle school EFL classroom. The writing objective of this paper is to attract teachers’attention to their verbal feedback and make them realize the significance of their verbal feedback in the classroom teaching. And thus they can improve their teaching efficiency.The author adopts the naturalistic inquiry to investigate the situation of teachers’ verbal feedback in Lu Xiang middle school by classroom observation, recording, transcription and questionnaire. Through the multiple methods, the author has analyzed the appropriateness of teachers’verbal feedback in six periods based on the Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Face-saving Principle. To ensure the reliability and validity of the research, the author uses the questionnaire as the complement to collect more information as to the teachers’daily verbal feedback in their classes.The research results are as follows:1)The positive feedback has been widely used in Lu Xiang middle school which has raised students’learning interest and classroom interaction enthusiasm.2)There are eight kinds of feedback patterns occurring in the class and the frequency of each pattern various. The most frequently used pattern is simple praise while direct criticism has seldom applied.3)There is no positive correlation between the amount of teachers’feedback and the enthusiasm of students’participation. The appropriate feedback is much better for the happening of learning.4) The ambiguity feedback happened in the class.5) No impolite feedback language in teachers’verbal feedback.The implications are the four aspects:1)It’s urgent and necessary for a teacher to do the action research to reflect on his/her feedback discourse.2)The second language teaching and learning theories have the essential role to play in teachers’professional development.3)The teacher should keep balance between the amount of teacher talk and student response.4)It’s time for the teacher to change the single feedback pattern and to use different feedback patterns flexibly in one period.5)The classroom interaction should be meaningful.Due to the limited time and energy, this study has following limitations:1) The research samples are limited in Lu Xiang middle school, and sample amount needs to be further enlarged.2)There is no systematical criteria to evaluate the appropriateness of teachers’ verbal feedback. And it’s still a question to employ the quantitative study to analyze the appropriateness of teachers’verbal feedback.3)The non-verbal feedback of teachers and the students’ difference have not been discussed in this paper, such as the gesture and facial expression, students’ gender and race.