A Study On Corrective Feedback Of Junior Middle School English Teachers Based On Speech Act Theory

As the core part of teaching process,teacher discourse has always been the focus of SLA researchers.Corrective feedback is a kind of teacher discourse,which refers to the teacher’s response to students’ wrong speech output.In English class,students’ language errors are inevitable,and teachers’ reasonable ways of error correction can help students develop good habit of error correction and output correct target language.The Speech Act Theory,which was put forward in the early1950 s,is a basic theory to study the use of language.Its main feature is to connect speech with act.Based on the Speech Act Theory,this study analyzes the three speech acts generated by corrective feedback,which is helpful for teachers to adopt corrective feedback reasonably,improve the effect of error correction,and for students to output the target language effectively.This study attempts to answer the following three research questions:1)What is the current situation of corrective feedback from teachers in junior middle school English classroom? 2)From the perspective of Speech Act Theory,how do different types of corrective feedback affect students’ English learning? 3)What are the students’ perspectives on teachers’ corrective feedback?In order to answer the above research questions,this study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,and selects5 junior middle school English teachers and 211 students as the research participants.First of all,10 listening and speaking classes of 5 English teachers are recorded and transcribed to establish a corpus.According to the classification of corrective feedback by Lyster and Ranta,the text materials are manually labeled.Secondly,the questionnaire about students’ views on teachers’ corrective feedback was sent out to the students.The top 30% and the bottom 30% of the students are divided into high-level language learners and low-level language learners according to their English mid-term examination scores,and 8 students were randomly selected for interview.The findings are as follows: firstly,in junior middle school English class,corrective feedback used by teachers accounts for 40.02% of teachers’ feedback.Among the six types of corrective feedback,explicit correction and elicitation are the most frequently used,followed by repetition and recast,and clarification request and metalinguistic feedback are the least used.Secondly,based on the Speech Act Theory,this paper analyzes the speech act force produced by corrective feedback,and the results show that the influence of corrective feedback on learners’ English learning is mainly reflected in two aspects: behavior and psychology.Finally,the paper analyzes the views of high-level language learners and low-level language learners on teachers’ corrective feedback.The results show that there are differences between the two groups of learners,mainly in whether the teacher should correct all the errors in the students’ oral English,who should correct errors,and their preference on the types of corrective feedback.Compared with high-level language learners,low-level language learners more would like to have their errors corrected,and they are less likely to have all the oral errors corrected.Besides,high-level language learners are more inclined to teacher correction and self correction.In addition,high-level language learners tend to prefer multiple types of corrective feedback,for low-level language learners,there is also uncertainty about recast,metalinguistic feedback,clarification request,and repetition,and they prefer explicit corrective feedback.Based on the above research results,the author puts forward some teaching suggestions on the application of corrective feedback for junior middle school English teachers.First of all,teachers should ensure the rationality of error correction behavior.Second,attention should be paid to the diversity of corrective feedback types.Third,teachers should consider many factors when using different types of corrective feedback,such as learner factors and objective factors in the classroom.Finally,teachers should learn and apply the Speech Act Theory to guide teaching practice.