Understanding Teacher Feedback In Interactive EFL Context

As one of the most common practice in English language teaching classrooms, teacher feedback has been playing an important role in facilitating language learning and learner development. Ever since the1970s, the concept of teacher feedback has received much attention from second language acquisition researchers around the world, providing overall support for the effectiveness of teacher feedback (Lee,2013; Lyster, Saito&Sato,2013). However, less attention has been paid to teacher feedback research at home, and far fewer research findings can be obtained in China (Zhang&Dai,2001), making it hard to get a holistic picture of teacher feedback practice and establish effective feedback mechanism suited to Chinese EFL context.In the past10years or so, the Chinese EFL researchers have concentrated their efforts on classroom feedback practice, and produced some valuable research findings. But most of the studies have just borrowed the conceptions of feedback from ESL context, and investigated its effect in the laboratory or experimental setting. Although these findings have enriched teacher feedback theory, the borrowed conceptions seem not to be enough for English language teaching at home, and the experimental results seem not to be enough for the natural EFL classroom either. The features of teacher feedback need to be analyzed and summarized at different levels and in different settings in order to build effective feedback mechanism and maximize the potential benefits of teacher feedback.This study is an in-depth investigation of teacher feedback in a particular interactive EFL course in one Chinese university setting. Adopting an emic perspective, the study addresses the teacher’s focus and decision-making in giving feedback, the distribution of feedback, the factors affecting feedback provision, the effect of feedback, and the students’perceptions, reactions, and expectations for teacher feedback in interactive Individualized English Learning course. A qualitative case study is adopted and the data are collected through interviews with one case instructor and15case students, participant observation, stimulated recall protocols, examinations of teacher’oral and written feedback, students’written work, and school and Ministry of Education documents.Results indicates that there are seven types of naturally occurring teacher feedback in interactive IEL course, including negotiated feedback, content feedback, task feedback, informational feedback, affective feedback, learning strategy feedback, and multiple feedback. Meanwhile, it is found that informational feedback is most preferred, but learning strategy feedback is least used across the course; there are different patterns of distribution between different feedback types as well as between oral and written teacher feedback. Data analysis also reveals that the provision of teacher feedback is affected by the following factors:teacher belief of feedback, teacher learning experience, time and energy constraint, and teacher belief of language teaching and learning; learner expectation, avoidance of face-threatening, individualization, learning performance and encouraging policy;’first among equals’ teacher-student relationship, learning task types and classroom activities.With regard to the effect of teacher feedback, the findings show that feedback has a great impact on students’ language learning, task performance, interest development, and personal development. Firstly, the findings show that teacher feedback could facilitate students’ language learning in the following ways: correcting language error, raising metalinguistic awareness, providing language input, pushing language output, promoting syntactic complexity, and drawing attention to writing format. Secondly, teacher feedback is found to be helpful to raise students’ awareness of integrating English learning with their interest development, guide students’ interest selection and promote further interest development. Thirdly, the analysis reveals that teacher feedback could have a positive effect on students’ task performance, including encouraging experiential learning by doing, helping students make their learning plans more specific and more operational, promoting task-related activities (e.g. talking, questioning and answering). Fourthly, teacher feedback is proved to be effective to encourage students’ autonomy and independence, foster cooperative learning, scaffold learning strategy, trigger critical thinking, and push up learning motivation.As regards students’perceptions of teacher feedback, all participants perceive the necessity of teacher feedback for their learning and development, but they appear to hold differing views concerning the audience, mode, timing and amount of teacher feedback. Regarding their reactions to teacher feedback, some participants show their positive attitudes by preserving feedback or sending retro feedback, while some express their fear of losing face or embarrassment when getting negative teacher feedback in class. Moreover, they report their expectations for teacher feedback, including more feedback on language errors, learning strategies and communication skills, more immediate and individualized feedback, and more teacher-student interaction as well as more feedback from fellow students.The finding provides a specific and contextualized view of the corrective, motivational, and social-cultural dimensions of teacher feedback. On the basis of the findings, the study proposes a tentative model between teacher feedback and language learner development in an attempt to get a more holistic and dynamic view of the form and focus of teacher feedback, the process and product of learner development and the interactive relationship between these two factors. Finally, the study points out the need for more research on teacher feedback practice to realize its great potentials to facilitate language learning and learner development. It also makes some suggestions for teacher feedback decision-making and classroom feedback research.