A Study On Teacher Feedback In English Class Of Junior Middle School

Teacher feedback is an extremely crucial component of teacher discourse.It exerts an influence on both students’ input and output.Through appropriate teacher feedback,students can effectively complete cognitive tasks beyond their actual abilities and reach a higher level of language competence.Therefore,teacher feedback plays a vital role in English teaching.However,the implementation of teacher feedback is not optimistic in junior middle school.Considering that,this research takes English teachers and students in Grade 7 in S junior middle school in Xinjin as research subjects.Moreover,based on classroom observation,questionnaire and interview,this research attempts to answer the following questions: 1.What is the current situation of English teacher feedback in junior middle school? 2.What are English teachers’ and students’ attitudes and preferences towards teacher feedback in junior middle school? 3.What are factors influencing the use of English teacher feedback in junior middle school?The result shows that: 1.Teacher feedback used by teachers is diverse.The frequency of positive feedback is higher than negative feedback.As regards positive feedback,approval with praise takes the most proportion while approval with more input takes the least proportion.For negative feedback,the most common used feedback is elicitation while recast is the least used.2.Teachers and students all realize the importance of teacher feedback in students’ learning.When students’ answers are correct,teachers prefer to use approval with more input.However,teachers usually use simple positive feedback due to limitation of teaching progress.Students hope to get approval with more input when their answers are correct.When students’ answers are incorrect,teachers prefer to use elicitation while students prefer to get metalinguistic feedback.When students have difficulty in answering questions,teachers and students like guidance rather than direct answers.3.Five factors influencing the use of teacher feedback can be concluded as follows: professional quality of teachers,language proficiency of students,personal traits of students,teaching tasks and the types of questions.Based on the results of this study,the following implications are drawn: 1.Teachers should reflect on their feedback and enhance professional quality;2.Teachers are supposed to adopt diverse teacher feedback according to the actual situation of students;3.Teachers should create situational dialogues to enhance students’ language competence.