A Study On The Use Of Teacher Feedback In English Classes Of Senior High School

Teacher feedback,as a crucial part of teachers’ discourse,is the key to triggering and maintaining teacher-student interaction in English classrooms,a huge source of increasing learners’ language input and promoting language output,and the crux to improving classroom teaching quality.In order to gain a deeper understanding of the current situation of English teacher feedback in high schools,this study collects 16 English classroom videos from 4 teachers,262 valid student questionnaires,and interview data from 4 teachers and 10 students in a high school in Guilin for statistical analysis so as to answer the following three questions: 1.What is the current situation of the use of English teacher feedback in high schools? 2.What are the attitudes and preferences of high school English teachers and students toward teacher feedback? 3.What are the factors that influence English teachers’ use of teacher feedback?The results of the study show that 1)according to the statistical analysis of different feedback of the four teachers,“Simple agreement”,“Agreement with repetition”,“Agreement with question”,“Giving tips”,“Choosing others to answer”,“Rephrasing the answers” and “Metalinguistic feedback” account for higher percentages in different situations of students’ answers to questions.Among them,“Simple agreement” is the highest percentage,followed by “Agreement with repetition”,“Agreement with expansion” accounts for less,and teachers hardly use “Criticism” and “Zero feedback”.2)Both high school English teachers and students agree that teacher feedback plays a vital role in the English classroom.Based on the analysis of the data collected,when students answer correctly,teachers tend to use “Simple agreement” and “Agreement with repetition”,while students want more comments and expansion;when students answer incompletely,teachers tend to use “Agreement with questions” and “Agreement with supplement”,while students want to complete answers under the guidance of teachers;when students cannot answer temporarily,teachers prefer to use “Giving hints”,which is basically the same as students’ expectation to get more hints and words of support from teachers or classmates;when students’ answers are wrong,teachers prefer to use indirect feedback such as “Rephrasing the answer” and “Metalinguistic feedback”,while students prefer to finish correcting the problem through their own independent thinking from teachers’ hints.3)There are three main factors that affect the use of teacher feedback by high school English teachers: the level of students’ language ability,the level of teachers’ professionalism,and the differences in teachers’ teaching styles.Based on the findings of this study,the following suggestions are drawn: 1)Teachers should be student-centered and give appropriate feedback according to students’ different characteristics and language proficiency.2)Teachers are supposed to understand their own preferences and habits in using feedback and students’ preferences for teacher feedback,so as to continuously improve and enrich their feedback.3)Teachers are suggested to strengthen teacher training and conduct post-class reflections.4)Students should strengthen their communication with teachers to express teacher feedback preferences and actively create classroom discourse turns with teachers.