An Investigation Of Teachers’ Feedback In Junior High School English Classes

In English classroom teaching,teachers’ discourse has attracted the attention of many scholars from all over the world.Teachers’ feedback is an important part of teachers’ discourse,it can not only provide evaluation for students’ performance in class,but also provide an important source of students’ language input.Teachers’ feedback plays an important role in classroom teaching activities.In China,literature review shows that correlational researches about teachers’ feedback began in the 1980 s,mainly focus on high school and college.Previous studies only used unilateral description to analysis teachers’ feedback,without considering students’ understanding and perception.Teaching aim will be maximized when both sides perceive the teacher’s feedback synchronously.Based on the input hypothesis,output hypothesis and interaction hypothesis,this study analyzes the use of teachers’ feedback in junior high school English classes,investigates the using types and characteristics of teachers’ feedback,understands teachers’ cognition,perception and expectation of different types of feedback.The author hopes it can provide reference for teachers’ teaching practice in the future,help teachers to enrich the use of feedback,teachers can use teachers’ feedback rationally and efficiently to promote students’ language acquisition.This research adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to study teachers’ feedback of junior high school English classes,aiming to answer the following two questions:1.What are the types and characteristics of teachers’ feedback used in junior high school English classes?2.What kind of perceptions and expectations do teachers and students have about the types of feedback used?In this article,teachers and students of the seventh grade of a suburban junior high school in Jilin Province were taken as the participants.With the permission,the author videoed the classes and transformed them verbatim.According to Lin Zhengjun and Zhou Sha’s（2011）classification of language teachers’ feedback,the author recorded the usage of simple feedback（simple repetition,praise,etc.）and hybrid feedback（positive feedback extension,repeated evaluation,etc.）at the same time.Through the questionnaire,we can know whether students’ perception of teachers’ feedback is consistent with teachers’ feedback,and we can also understand teachers’ and students’ expectation of feedback.Through interviews,we can understand why the differences about teachers’ feedback exists in teachers’ classes.Statistical results show that:（1）According to the descriptive analysis,the usage of single feedback is more than complex feedback.One-way ANOVA results showed the significant difference in single feedback（induction,expansion,direct negation,finding someone to answer）between experienced and inexperienced groups.[F=93.962,58.654,15.571,15.500,p=0.002,0.004,0.026,0.026] As for complex feedback,positive feedback plus repetition,repetition and expansion,repetition and metalinguistic feedback varied significantly between the two groups.[F=29.167,13.000,11.605,p=0.011,0.033,0.039]（2）The questionnaire data shows that both teachers and students have higher expectations of complex feedback than single feedback.As for single feedback,students expect teachers to use specific evaluation,followed by induction,repetition,simple praise and finding someone to answer these 5 ways;80 percent of teachers choose evaluation and induction,and 60 percent of teachers tend to use simply praise and repetition.（3）Whether the teachers’ feedback expectations are synchronized with the students’ perception will affect the teaching effect.We can also learn from the interview that teachers pay more attention to the use of complex feedback,and some of them believe that teaching experience is the main factor affecting the choice of teachers’ feedback.Based on these three situations,the author puts forward the following suggestions:we should use more complex feedback in classroom teaching.Young teachers should exhibit their own advantages to make up for the lack of feedback language.Such as using full emotions and unique enthusiasm to infect students,arousing the charm of English with their favourable language literacy.