A Pragmatic Study On Teachers' Positive Verbal Feedback In College English Classroom

Teachers'feedback is an indispensable element of teacher talk. Positive feedback can help to create positive, relax and supportive language learning atmosphere,meanwhile help students to more actively and initiatively participate in classroom interaction. Also it is an evaluation of students'performance, encouragement for their improvement and suggestion for future progress. Therefore, the study of teachers'feedback is of great importance for language teaching.The studies on teacher talk and teachers'feedback are inseparable from each other. Most of previous studies just take teachers'feedback as an essential part of teacher talk and make descriptive studies of amount, characteristics and functions of teacher talk, or study the art of teacher talk and teachers'feedback from the perspective of pedagogy. Another research perspective regard teacher talk as an important source of language input. There are some experimental studies focusing on relationship between teacher talk and second language acquisition (Ellis 2000: 605).Although there are plenty of researches about teacher talk, few of them focus on teachers'feedback only; systematic researches from the perspective of pragmatics are even rare. Actually, as an evaluation of students'performance, there are some elements in teachers'feedback which can threaten students'self-esteem and then lead to anxiety, especially for Chinese students, who pay much attention to their face and usually have great anxiety in English classes. Therefore, pragmatic study on teachers'feedback would be necessary.Under the framework of Speech Act Theory and Politeness Theory, from the perspective of pragmatics, the present study, being a qualitative and quantitative one, uses the instruments of 30 periods of classroom observation and interview with 10 teachers, found out that there are ten types of teachers'positive feedback, which can be categorized into implicit positive feedback and explicit positive feedback. Explicit positive feedback covers 61.8%, among which"simple praise"is the most frequently used way which amounts to a percentage of 17.6%. There are three speech act types of teachers'positive feedback, which are directives, expressives and representatives. The pragmatic purposes are encouragement, appreciation, and positive evaluation of students'performance, inspire, stimulate further thinking, arouse interest and so on. Most teachers are aware of the students'face wants and employed appropriate strategies to improve teaching effects in their classroom feedback. Under the category of positive politeness strategies, which accounts for 55.8%,"Give gifts to hearer (praise, compliments)"and"Seek agreement/Avoid disagreement"are most frequently employed by teachers. Under the category of negative politeness strategies, hedge and minimize the imposition account for 7.2% and 7.5% respectively. Another important strategy is off record strategy, amounting for 23.2%. At last, the author gives some implications to improve foreign language teaching: firstly, teachers should be aware of the pragmatic meaning of their feedback and the ways of giving feedback, then, teachers should pay attention to the employment of politeness strategies in their feedback and the effectiveness of positive feedback in order to facilitate foreign language teaching. Meanwhile, the theoretical implication will help the enrichment the content of speech act theory and politeness strategies under the context of classroom teaching.