A Case Study Of Teacher Feedback In English Class Of Senior High School

As a crucial component of teacher discourse, teacher feedback is a key factor for teachers’ classroom management and for students’ development. Appropriate teacher feedback not only contributes to providing important input resources for students but also promoting students’ language output through teacher-student interaction. In the past thirty years, scholars from home and abroad have done a lot of researches on teacher feedback. However, few of them focus on senior high classroom, so the author feels the urge to find out the current situation of teacher feedback here.Hence, the author adopts Krashen’s Input hypothesis, Long’s interaction hypothesis as well as the scaffolding theory as the theoretical support. By means of two teaching methods, including classroom observation, teacher questionnaire and student questionnaire, an empirical study was conducted in No.25 senior high school of Tian Jin. This thesis is intended to find out the current situation of teacher feedback in senior high school including major types of teacher feedback, functions of different types of teacher feedback and factors that influence the effectiveness of teacher feedback so as to find out proper feedback strategies that are suitable for senior high school.By means of the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the findings show that due to the high pressure of the college entrance examination, the interaction between teachers and students and also types of teacher feedback in senior high school were really not satisfactory. The practical class is characterized by grammar-vocabulary teaching, without enough attention to teacher feedback. Based on the previous classifications as well as the author’s observation of the class, teacher feedback in senior high school English class can be divided into three categories:verbal feedback and non-verbal feedback; collective feedback and individual feedback; positive feedback and negative feedback. Then the author analyzed the functions of different types and the factors that influence the effectiveness of teacher feedback. Although teachers apply these feedbacks from time to time, not all of them are always effective. In view of this, the author suggested:1.Teacher feedback should be student-centered and based on the specific condition of individual student including their level of English proficiency, personality type and class performance; 2. Teachers’ feedback is better to be vivid, spontaneous and diversified instead of being stereotyped and grammar-focused all the time; 3.When giving feedback, teachers should take efficiency principles into consideration, applying understandable and acceptable feedback for students.