A Case Study Of Senior High School English Teachers’ Feedback Beliefs And Their Practices

Under the background of the New Era in which our state implements a new round of English curriculum reform in high school and improves teachers’ professional literacy,teacher feedback literacy is a focus of researchers in second language acquisition and second language teaching.In second-language classroom teaching,teacher feedback is not only an important practical form of teaching and learning,but also a key to triggering and maintaining teacher-student classroom interaction.A large number of studies have shown that teacher feedback has a positive effect on students’ second-language learning.However,as teacher’s oral feedback in class has a certain degree of immediacy,it is difficult to prepare in advance,thus it is a great challenge for teachers.Additionally,teacher’s feedback performance is affected by the interaction of multiple factors,such as teacher’s feedback knowledge,attitude toward feedback,teaching beliefs,and teaching context.Research has found a degree of misalignment between teachers’ feedback beliefs and their pedagogical feedback performance.However,there are few Chinese-context situated empirical studies on high school English teachers’ feedback beliefs and performance as well as their mapping relationships.This study,using classroom observation,questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview,investigated the oral feedback beliefs and classroom feedback performance of three in-service high school English teachers who were voluntarily recruited as research participants,and analyzed the correspondence between their feedback beliefs and performance as well as the potential underlying reasons for the relationship,so as to better understand and optimize teachers’ feedback performance in high school English class,and provide some implications for teachers’ feedback literacy development in in-service teacher training and pre-service teacher education.The study was guided under the following three questions:(1)What types of feedback do the three senior high school English teachers use and in what way do they interact with students in class?(2)What beliefs do the three senior high school English teachers hold about oral feedback in the classroom teacher-student interaction?(3)To what extent do the three senior high school English teachers’ beliefs about oral feedback match their practices? Why?The findings are as follows.First,the classroom feedback performance of the three high school English teachers were diverse.In macroscopic view,the three teachers tended to use positive feedback of “praise + repetition” and “simple praise”,but there were individual differences in the choice of specific feedback types.In addition,there was convergence among the three teachers in their understanding of four aspects,that is,the necessity of teachers’ oral feedback,feedback types,feedback focus,and the timing of providing feedback,but there were differences in their comprehension of feedback subjects and strategies.What’s more,their feedback beliefs of the necessity of teachers’ oral feedback,feedback type,and timing of feedback are more consistent with their feedback performance in class,and there is a certain degree of misalignment in terms of feedback focus,subject and feedback strategy.The(mis)alignment between the three teachers’ oral feedback beliefs and their performance in class are believed to be related with the macro socio-cultural context and the micro classroom teaching context in which teacher feedback occurs.Accordingly,the author suggests that teachers should not only pay attention to the diversification teachers’ feedback and distribution of interactive discourse power between teachers and students,but also provide moderate negative feedback in teacher-student interaction.In addition,awareness of feedback literacy should be cultivated and developed in in-service teacher training and per-service teacher education.