Study Of The Application Of Teachers’ Feedback In Junior High School English Listening & Speaking Class

Teachers’ feedback is the carrier of students’ language learning,which plays a vital role in classroom teaching.From 1980 s,researchers in China began to study teachers’ feedback.They mainly analyze corrective feedback,and the scope of research focuses on college and senior high school.Moreover,there are few studies on teachers’ feedback in junior high school.In addition,researches focus on reading classes,and little attention is paid to listening & speaking classes.In view of this,this paper investigates the usage of teachers’ feedback in English listening & speaking class of junior high school.Based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Affective Filtering Hypothesis,Initiation-Response-Feedback mode(also named IRF interactive mode)and Long’s Interaction Theory,the author randomly selected 240 students and 63 English teachers of grade two in junior high school in Qingdao as research participants.Classroom observation,questionnaire and interview were used to study the usage of teachers’ feedback,the attitudes and preferences of students and teachers towards feedback,and the discrepancies of attitudes and preferences between teachers and students.SPSS 25.0 and Excel 2010 were used for statistical analysis of data.This paper mainly solves these questions:(1)What are the sub-types and frequency of teachers’ feedback in junior English listening & speaking class?(2)What are the attitudes and preferences of students and teachers towards feedback?(3)What are the discrepancies of attitudes and preferences between teachers and students?The main findings are as follows: 1.Teachers mainly use four types of positive feedback and six types of negative feedback in English listening & speaking class.Positive feedback includes simple praise,praise plus repetition,praise plus expansion and praise plus comment.Among them,simple praise is most frequently used and praise plus expansion is least frequently used.Moreover,negative feedback includes explicit correction,recast,elicitation,repetition,clarification request and meta-linguistic feedback.Among them,the frequency of explicit correction is highest,and the frequency of meta-linguistic feedback is lowest.On the whole,positive feedback is used more frequently than negative feedback.2.Students and teachers both believe that teachers’ feedback is of great value in English listening & speaking class.Teachers and students have the same preference towards feedback.They both like praise plus expansion and elicitation,and dislike explicit correction.3.Teachers speak highly of teachers’ feedback in English listening & speaking class.Teachers actually use simple praise and explicit correction more,while their ideal feedbacks are praise plus expansion and elicitation.And students’ preferred feedback is not consistent with teachers’ actual use,but it is consistent with teachers’ ideal feedback.Therefore,the following teaching suggestions are put forward.Firstly,teachers should keep the consistency between actual use and ideal feedback.At the same time,teachers should consider students’ preference and needs when they use feedback and reduce the gap between them.Secondly,teachers should improve the quality of teachers’ feedback and use various feedback types flexibly but pertinently,so as to trigger continuous IRF mode,thus promote English listening & speaking class teaching and students’ learning.