Analysis Of College Teachers’ English Classroom Corrective Feedback From The Perspective Of Multimodality

Corrective feedback is a hot research issue in applied linguistics in recent years.However,previous research has only studied the verbal mode in teachers’ corrective feedback,ignoring the role of various non-verbal modes.Multimodality provides a new insight for a comprehensive understanding of teachers’ classroom corrective feedback.In addition,many empirical studies on corrective feedback at home and abroad focus on the middle school English classroom and pay less attention to the college English classroom which mainly attempts to cultivate students’ comprehensive English ability.Therefore,this study takes the college English classroom as the research site and analyzes the teachers’ classroom corrective feedback from the perspective of multimodality.Based on Lyster and Ranta’s(1997)Error Treatment Sequence and Norris’(2004)Communicative Modes,this study analyzes the corrective feedback of the four teachers who work in the English department of a college in one province in North China,aiming to interpret the classroom corrective feedback from the perspective of multimodality.The research focuses on the implementation effects of the four teachers’ classroom corrective feedback on verbal mode and non-verbal modes,and the relationship between the two modes.The results are as follows: in terms of the verbal mode,all four teachers use six corrective feedback strategies including recast,explicit correction,metalinguistic feedback,clarification request,elicitation and repetition.The effect of form negotiation is the most prominent,especially in triggering students’ grammar repair and vocabulary repair;the effect of recast is weak,but it can effectively correct the students’ pronunciation errors and improper use of L1.As for the non-verbal mode,in recast and form negotiation,the teachers’ iconic gestures,metaphoric gestures and mutual participant alignment contribute to error correction.In explicit correction,the teachers’ beat gestures and the teacher to student alignment are conducive to raisingthe students’ awareness of error correction.Teachers’ head beats and smile also indirectly encourage students to find errors and correct them.In addition,in classroom corrective feedback,non-verbal modes are always accompanied by verbal mode for error correction,which improves the efficiency of error correction to a certain extent.This study provides a multimodal description of classroom corrective feedback and interpretation of the process in which the verbal and non-verbal modes cooperate to facilitate classroom error correction.In addition,the results can help teachers select effective corrective feedback strategies in future classroom error correction.