A Study Of The Difference Between Teacher Feedback And Students' Expectations In Senior High School English Classroom

Teacher talk is a main form of classroom interaction between teachers and students and an important carrier of students' comprehensible language input and output. Teacher feedback is a main component of teacher talk and is drawing more attention from many linguists and researchers in the field of SLA. Furthermore, teacher feedback plays a significant role in promoting the classroom communication between teachers and students and improving the effect of classroom teaching. Some researches indicate that positive feedback can strengthen students' confidence and learning interests, and thus promote students' language acquisition whereas negative feedback can contribute to correcting students' mistakes, but the improper use of teacher feedback can spoil students' initiative.In China the researches on teacher feedback started at the end of the twentieth century and most of them are about the investigation of college English classroom. A few researches were conducted in senior high school, especially the comparative study between teacher feedback and students' expectations. Therefore, the thesis conducted a comparative study of teacher feedback and students' expectations in Xinghe No. 1 middle school.Theoretical basis of the thesis is Long's Interaction Hypothesis and IRF(Initiation-Response-Feedback) Model. The author of the thesis adopted the following instruments, namely, questionnaires and classroom observation and interviews in the thesis, aiming at comparing the differences between students' expectations of teacher feedback and teachers' actual behaviors in the classroom. The thesis mainly focuses on the two questions as follows:(1)What are the differences between the attitudes towards teacher feedback of teachers and students, if any?(2)What are the types of teacher feedback in which teachers' actual behaviors differ from students' expectations, if the differences do exist?Based on the results of data analysis, the following major findings were obtained.(1) Students' and teachers' attitudes to teacher feedback significantly differ from each other in seven aspects as follows: the usage of simple feedback in English classroom, waiting time during answering questions, the preference for simple questions teachers ask, students' fear of being criticized for mistakes in the process of answering questions, the importance of listening carefully, the preference for correcting errors by teachers and multiple communication in the form of ask-and-answer.(2) There is an enormous discrepancy in types of teacher feedback between students' expectations and teachers' actual behaviors. In terms of positive feedback, the sequence of students' preference is approval with expansion, next is approval with comment, approval with repetition and simple approval, while teachers turn the sequence upside down while using the positive feedback in actual classroom. With regard to negative feedback, students' expectations are noticeably different from teachers' actual behavior in recast, explicit correction and meta-linguistic feedback. Namely, students dislike recast and explicit correction, which are, conversely, used frequently in English classroom by teachers, especially recast, which is used most frequently in class. Instead, students have a great preference for meta-linguistic feedback, while teachers seldom use the error-correction method in actual English classroom.Some implications are drawn on the basis of the research results. First of all, teachers should combine types of teacher feedback with students' individual differences and the level of difficulty for each question. Secondly, teachers should use the types of teacher feedback in accordance with students' expectations. Thirdly, the diversity of types of teacher feedback needs to be closely heeded. Finally, teachers' theoretical knowledge about feedback should be enhanced in the future.