A Study On Teachers' Corrective Feedback In Junior Middle School English Classes From The Perspective Of Multimodal Analysi

Corrective feedback in the classroom is a hot topic in the field of foreign language teaching in recent years.Scholars home and abroad have paid much attention to the verbal mode of teachers’ corrective feedback,but little attention has been given to its non-verbal modes.The emergence and application of multimodal theory has offered a new perspective for the research of corrective feedback and hence changed the research landscape.From a multi-modal perspective,this study aims to explore the effects of teachers’ verbal and non-verbal modes on the corrective feedback and the relationship between them.In this study,Lyster and Ranta’s Error Treatment Sequence(1997)was used to analyze the effect of teachers’ verbal mode on students’ error correction.Based on the Norris’ s(2004)Communicative Modes,the functions and effects of nonverbal modes were discussed.With the help of Long’s Interaction Hypothesis(1983),the relationship between verbal and non-verbal modes was explored.The data was collected from the 12 th National English Demonstration Teaching in Junior High School via multi-modal labeling software ELAN,aiming to solve three research questions:In junior high English classes,(1)what corrective feedback strategies are reflected in the verbal mode of teachers’ corrective feedback? Which strategy works best for error correction?(2)Which non-verbal modes,along with verbal mode,participate in corrective feedback process?What is the role of nonverbal modes in error correction?(3)What is the relationship between the corrective feedback strategy in the teacher’s verbal mode and the non-verbal modes?Based on the analysis of the data,the following conclusions of the current study are drawn.Firstly,as for the verbal modes,all teachers in the demonstration videos used six corrective feedback strategies.Recast was used the most frequently and played an important role in correcting phonetic errors.The overall uptake rate and repair rate of form negotiation were the highest.Form negotiation was the most prominent in correcting grammatical and lexical errors.Secondly,in terms of non-verbal modes,English teachers mainly used gestures,gaze,head movement and facial expression to promote error correction.Beat gestures and deictic gestures were mainly used in recast and explicit correction,which can promote students’ uptake and repair.Mutual participant alignment was used most frequently in form negotiation and recast,while the teacher to student alignment was used by teachers most frequently in explicit correction,which can enhance students’ reflection and correction.Teachers usually nodded to the students to show their approval or strengthen their tone to increase the frequency of interactions.Teachers’ smiling helped students to overcome embarrassment and respond positively.Finally,non-verbal modes have always accompanied and assisted verbal mode in teacher’s corrective feedback,and both modes have occurred in teacher’s corrective feedback process.The implication of this study is that when English teachers provide corrective feedback to students,they can give more positive feedback to students by appropriately applying verbal corrective feedback strategies and paying attention to non-verbal modes of error correction.In addition,English teachers should balance the time allocated to teaching and to error correction,and provide students with more opportunities for language output and correction practice,so as to improve the quality of teaching and achieve better teaching results.