A Study On Teacher's Corrective Feedback In Comprehensive English Classroom Under The Framework Of Relevance Theory

The past 2 decades saw a large number of researches concerning the discourse analysis of the teacher talk in the classroom. Interaction between the teachers and the students take the most part of the class hours, and is seen to be very crucial to a learner's learning process. Teachers'corrective feedback can be regarded as one of the important constituent in teacher talk in the classrooms. It seemed that when correcting students' errors, the teacher should give explicit feedback in order to make it comprehensible to the students. However, for the sake of face-saving, encouraging classroom interaction and active thinking, corrective feedbacks should be given implicitly sometimes. Thus, how to make both ends meet? Relevance Theory studies the ostension, relevance and contextual effect through the cognitive view. The current thesis intends to look into the insights of teacher-student interaction with the framework of Relevance Theory.The present study made an observation of the application of corrective feedback strategies in comprehensive English classes in a normal university. It is found that the cases of feedbacks can be roughly fit into the categories given by Lyster and Ranta. However, the distribution and efficiency differs greatly from the previous study.Based on the observation, the study adopted Relevance Theory in making further research on the distribution and efficiency of different feedback types. It is revealed that error correction process can be regarded as a process for the teacher to guide the students to seek optimal relevance that was already guaranteed by the teacher. The teacher's responsibility is to change the students'cognitive environment, and to reconstruct contextual effect, to achieve adequate relevance with least effort. The data analyzing process proved that Relevance Theory can be applicable to the interpretation of University English teaching which aims to improve students'communicative competence. Relevance Theory also showed its explanatory power on the distribution and efficiency of different types of corrective feedback.Finally, according to the empirical research and the analysis, the current study provided some suggestions for both teachers and students to enhance efficient corrective feedback in classroom interactions.