An Investigation Of Teacher Feedback In Senior High School English Classrooms

In English classrooms, Teacher Talk is not only the instructional tool,but also the key source of students' comprehensible language input, which plays a very important role in language teaching and language acquisition. As a part of teachers' classroom discourse, teachers' classroom feedback evaluates the output of target language from students, gives them assessment of classroom performance, helps them correct mistakes or inappropriate language usage, and increases the interaction between teachers and students. However, facing the heavy teaching task and limited time, our high school English teachers pay more attention to teaching content and objectives, but less attention to the importance of their own classroom feedback discourse. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the usage of English teachers' feedback in senior high schools and to know the students and teachers' attitudes to it.The research is conducted under the theoretical guidance of Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Long's Interaction Hypothesis and Vogotsky's Scaffolding theory. 5 English teachers and 320 students in Jigang Senior High School are selected as the research objects. Then corpora and data are collected through classroom observation and recording, questionnaires and interviews. The thesis attempts to explore the status-quo, features, and the impact of English teacher feedback in senior high schools from the following four aspects: the amount of teachers' feedback discourse, the different usage of each teachers' feedback, the students' cognition of and preference for teachers' feedback, and the teachers' views and the basis of choosing feedback strategies. The result of this investigation can provide valuable reference for teachers who, therefore, will be able to use teacher feedback more appropriately and effectively so as to give a full play to teachers' feedback in helping students with their language acquisition.By means of the quantitative and qualitative analysis and discussion, the author gets the following results:(1) The average use of teachers' feedback discourse is about 47.7 times for each class, which covers about 38.1% of the teachers' talk, andteachers vary in their use of feedback.(2) Based on the analysis and comparison of each teacher's feedback, we find that the amount of positive feedback is much higher than that of the negative feedback, the highest rate of positive feedback being simple praise. The highest rate of negative feedback is recast, followed by repetition, with clarification request in the lowest rate.(3) According to the result of questionnaires, we find that students generally agreed that teachers' feedback has great influence on their learning. Most of students affirm that positive feedback can promote their learning, but whether the negative feedback would be detrimental to their initiative is still uncertain. In terms of the type of teacher feedback, data show that: the students hope to get additional comments rather than simple praise when they answer a question correctly; when they cannot answer questions promptly, the students hope they can get more guidance and discourse support from teachers; and when the students cannot answer the question correctly, they prefer to get indirect correction, such as recast, or metalinguistic feedback.(4) According to the results of the interviews, the author finds that the teachers firmly believe teachers' feedback effect on the students' learning, and their basis of choosing feedback strategies vary. The main factors that cause the different use of teachers' feedback include feedback awareness, the teachers' professional qualities, and personal teaching styles.In order to improve teachers' feedback in senior high school English classrooms, some meaningful implications are proposed based on the present findings: Firstly, teachers should follow the feedback objects, and make full use of the functions of teachers' feedback. Secondly, teachers should improve the styles of teachers' feedback and use them synthetically. Thirdly, teachers should reflect timely and critically based on their feedback practice after class, and strengthen their overall professional qualities.