The Interpersonal Function Of Teacher Feedback In Junior Middle School English Class

In recent years,researches on teacher talk have increased.As a crucial part of teacher talk,teacher feedback plays a key role in evaluating student performance,promoting student language input and maintaining teacher-student interaction.Recently,it has become an important aspect of domestic and foreign scholars.Previous studies on teacher feedback language mostly point to the evaluation function of teacher feedback or written feedback in college English classrooms,but lacks in-depth discussion about the grammatical structure of teacher feedback,and how to use it to initiate and maintain more classroom interactions and achieve teacher-student meaningful communication.This research is started from the interpersonal function and the natural observation method is adopted to analyze the teacher feedback in junior middle school English class.This research mainly solves the following problems:(1)What are the characteristics of the mood system and the use of personal pronouns in teacher feedback?(2)What are the characteristics of the modality system in teacher feedback?(3)How does the teacher feedback affect teacher-student communication?In this research,three English teachers from a middle school in Nanning are chosen as the research subjects,without intervention,the data is obtained through classroom observation and recording.After that,the class videos are transcribed into written form and all the teacher feedback are labelled in the texts.Then the functional grammatical structure of teacher feedback,including the Mood system,Modality system and personal pronoun,is analyzed combing the students’ output after the feedback-move to find the characteristics of the teacher feedback and its impact on teacher-student interaction in class.The findings of this study are as follows:(1)The commonly used structure of teacher feedback is “simple affirmation and follow-up feedback”,which seldom denies students’ opinions or ignores students’ answers,and the most commonly used structure is “affirmation and restatement”.(2)In the mood system of teacher feedback,declarative mood and interrogative mood are used most,which shows that the function of giving and obtaining information is dominant.(3)The personal pronouns most commonly used in teacher feedback is the second person including the singular and plural forms,and the subject they refer is clear.Teacher feedback is student-centered.(4)In junior middle school English class,low-value,mid-value and high-value modality are commonly used in teacher feedback,which reflects that teacher feedback not only cares about students’ emotional experience,but also pays attention to the certainty and objectivity of language.The teacher-student interaction is a complex system.This study is an exploration of the interpersonal function of teacher feedback,hoping to be of some value to the use and research of teacher feedback.First of all,teacher feedback should be more specific and interactive.Secondly,teacher can increase their feedback as the function of obtaining information and triggering students to respond.Finally,teachers should use their feedback in a right time and appropriate form to reduce students’ communication pressure so that they can establish and maintain harmonious and equal teacher-student relationship.