A Study On Excellent English Teachers’ Feedback In Primary School

This study was undertaken to investigate the use of teacher feedback by the excellent primary school English teachers and how the excellent primary school English teachers adopt teachers’feedback effectively. The theoretical bases of this study are Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Long’s Interaction Hypothesis. The significance of the study is to arouse the awareness among English teachers of the importance of teacher feedback, and thus improve their teaching efficiency and effectiveness.The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. What’s the distribution feature of the excellent primary school English teachers’ feedback?2. What’s the influence of the excellent primary school English teachers’ feedback on the students’ oral production and classroom interaction?Subjects were 6 excellent primary school English teachers from Xinghua Jingfan primary school in Jiangsu province. The instruments of this study were classroom observation, audio-recording and discourse analysis. The data is from the six excellent teachers’ high quality public classes, each teacher a lesson. Data collection and analysis included three steps:firstly, use two MP3 players to record the six classes during the listening. Secondly, transcribe the audio-recording into texts. Thirdly, Microsoft Excel is used to collect and analyze the data. Descriptive statistics analysis was employed to describe the distribution feature of excellent primary school English teachers’feedback. Discourse analysis was used to analyze the interactions between the teachers and students.This study has yielded the following major findings:Firstly, the excellent primary school English teachers use 8 types of positive verbal feedback and 4 types of negative verbal feedback in their English classroom. They have great preference for the use of positive feedback, with a ratio of 97.75%. Among of the positive feedback, such as simple approval, asking continuously, confirmation repetition and hint feedback are frequently used by the teachers, with the simple approval (31.82%) ranking first, followed by asking continuously (30.31%), confirmation repetition (19.05%), hint feedback (8.83%). The rest four positive feedback, namely encouragement, doubted repetition, thank and elicitation, are least frequently used by the teachers, with the thank (4.18%) ranking first, followed by doubted repetition (2.44%), encouragement (2.09%), elicitation (1.28%). As to negative feedback, Recast, which with the ratio of 64.7% among of the negative feedback, is the most frequent negative feedback used by the teachers. The teachers seldom use the rest three negative feedback, namely giving the answers by teachers, explicit correction and asking another student to answer.Secondly, the influence of the excellent primary school English teachers’feedback on the students’oral production and classroom interaction is very obvious and optimistic. They improve the students’ oral production and classroom interaction by making use of the feedback of asking continuously, encouragement, hint feedback, elicitation and doubted repetition and recast, with asking continuously (1645words) ranking first, followed by encouragement (261words), hint feedback (198words), recast (58words) and doubted repetition (39words). However, there are some feedback which cannot elicit any words from the students, namely simple approval, thank, giving the answers by teachers and confirming repetition. In addition, the excellent primary English teachers’feedback also promotes the classroom interaction effectively in the English class.This study provides some implications. Firstly, teachers should choose appropriate and positive feedback so as to promote students’learning enthusiasm. Secondly, teachers should weigh the balance between different forms of teacher feedback. They should give feedback according to the teaching objectives and such learner differences as their characters. Thirdly, teachers should take action research to improve their teacher feedback and help them reflect their teaching effects and promote the quality of classroom teaching.However, this thesis has its limitations. Firstly, the author just analyses the verbal feedback, while the nonverbal feedback is excluded. Secondly, the number of material is few. Thirdly, the classroom interaction is a very complicated process. Due to many restrictions, the author just studies the interaction between the teachers and the students.