A Study On The Feedback Of English Teachers In Senior High EFL Classrooms

The present study reviews relevant literature concerning the classifications, features and functions of teacher’s feedback in class and IRF Model. The relationship between teacher’s feedback and students’immediate output is explored.Under the guidance of Interaction Hypothesis and Socio-constructivist Theory, the present study chooses 10 regular classes and 6 demonstration classes as research subjects. The research of Jiang (2010) provides the analysis framework for the study. Two research questions are explored:1) the patterns and features of teacher’s feedback; 2) the effect of different types of teacher’s feedback on students’immediate output.Quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the research. Data are calculated by software Excel and teacher-student interaction episodes are selected for case study. The results show that 1) the average number of teacher’s feedback in demonstration classes is slightly larger than that of regular classes, and is 27.83 times and 26.10 times respectively. The most frequently used types of feedback are acknowledging the correct answers, continuing the topic and discoursal feedback, while the least used type is confirmation check. Acknowledging the answer takes up 30% of the total number of teacher’s feedback in demonstration classes, while the percentage of this type in regular classes is about 19%. Extension/ guiding only accounts for 3.59% of demonstration classes, but the proportion takes up nearly 10% in regular classes.2) Different types of teacher’s feedback lead to diversified amount of students’ immediate output. Clarification requests, continuing the topic and discoursal feedback lead to the largest quantity of students’ immediate output, which are 5.50 words,5.26 words and 3.40 words. The quantity elicited by recast and expansion are the smallest, which is no more than 1 word. Clarification request and encouragement are least frequently used in class, but the students’immediate output ranks the first and third place. Although clarification request and confirmation check are least used in class, these two kinds of feedback lead to high-quality output.The implications of the study are as follows. To begin with, it is crucial for teachers to learn from both demonstration and regular classes. Teachers are supposed to guide students to interact more often in regular classes, and feedback in demonstration classes should be balanced in content and form. Second, teachers are supposed to pay attention to the quality of feedback to provide students with more opportunities to produce immediate output, such as adopting more feedback of clarification request, confirmation check and encouragement from categories of meaning clarification, development of students’ discourse. Third, meaningful context is necessary for negotiation for meaning in EFL classrooms, and teachers are supposed to pay more attention to the process of students’ immediate output. Last but not the least, in order to promote the second language acquisition and output performance of students, necessary ’scaffolding’ should be provided timely in terms of cognition and affection.