A Study Of Teacher Feedback In Senior High Schools

Teacher talk has been a research focus for linguists and second language acquisitionresearchers both at home and abroad. Teacher feedback, an essential part of teacher talk,is not only an important tool for teacher-student interaction, but also closely related tostudents’ language input and output. What is more, teacher feedback plays an importantrole in students’ emotional development. However, from the analysis of the previousstudies, the affective perspective of teacher feedback is short and the research on seniorhigh schools needs further exploration, what is more, teacher feedback in different classtypes needs further investigation.Based on the previous studies, the present thesis undertakes an investigation onteacher feedback in4different kinds of class types. Taking8English teachers in4seniorhigh schools as research subjects and adopting classroom observation, lesson transcriptsanalysis, and interview as main methods, the present paper explores the actual use ofteacher feedback in senior high school classroom setting in Ganzhou city and thefunctions of teacher feedback in practical language teaching. What is more, this thesisinvestigates whether teacher feedback meets students’ needs and expectations by taking20teachers’ questionnaires and413students’ questionnaires as supplements. The resultsare calculated in SPSS. Based on the data collected in classroom observation and thesurvey results, this paper summarizes the main problems in teacher feedback.The research data shows that:1) There are19types of teacher feedback in theobserved classes and teachers use them variously.2) The positive feedback is mechanicaland lacks flexibility.3) Implicit corrective feedback needs to be further enhanced.Teachers seldom use prompt, elicitation, meta-linguistic feedback, and recast to guidestudents to self-modify.4)80%of teacher feedback in senior high schools isform-focused. The discoursal feedback, focusing on the content of students’ answer, needsdevelopment.5) Teacher feedback in senior high schools mainly plays the role ofcognitive function (evaluation and correction) while the emotional function needs furtherimprovement.6) Teacher feedback needs further improvement in triggering students’output, stimulating students’ further thinking, and eliciting connected IRF. Besides, meaning negotiation is desperately short.7) The present teacher feedback in classroomscan not fully meet students’ expectation.With a full understanding of actual use of teacher feedback in Ganzhou city andaccording to humanism and SLA theories (Krashen’s input hypothesis, Swain’s outputhypothesis, and Long’s interaction hypothesis), the present research draws the followingconclusions: The teacher feedback in Ganzhou city fails to provide enough affectivescaffolding for students and fails to provide standard, rich target language input, triggerstudents’ output, and stimulate classroom interaction. All in all, the quality of teacherfeedback needs to be further improved.Based on theoretical analysis and research data, this paper suggests: Teachers shoulddevelop the awareness of professional development and learn the related theories actively;and teachers should realize the evaluative, interactive, and affective functions of teacherfeedback in practice. What is more, teachers should promote the balanced development ofstudents’ cognition and affect by appropriate use of effective teacher feedback.