A Study On Teachers' Verbal Feedbacks In English Majors' Comprehensive English Class

Teacher talk is not only the tool for carrying out teachers' teaching plan, but also an important source of input for students. Teachers' feedback is an important element of teacher talk in classroom interaction. In classroom interaction, teachers' feedback can help students to understand the teaching material better and teachers can also correct students' mistakes through feedbacks. Effective feedback can stimulate students' study interest, but improper feedback may discourage students. Therefore, the study of teachers' feedback is of great importance to language teaching.Since the late 1980s, there are plenty of studies about classroom as language environment in the research field of second language acquisition (SLA). Most of studies are about classroom language, especially the descriptive studies of teacher talk, the studies of the verbal interaction between the teacher and the student, and experimental studies of the relationship between classroom language and language acquisition. Teachers' feedback is an important aspect in the field of second language classroom research. But in domestic research, there are still not enough researches about teachers' feedback.This study is based on the related studies from home and abroad and use Input Hypothesis, Interaction Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis in second language acquisition as criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of teachers' feedback. Teachers and students in 4 freshmen's classes and 4 sophomores' classes from English department are chosen to be the subjects. The comprehensive English course of these 8 classes have been observed and recorded to get the data, then the data have been transcribed to words. This research tries to find answers to the following 3 questions on the basis of the genuine data: (1) What are the characteristics of teachers' verbal feedback in comprehensive English class? (2) What are the techniques of teachers' verbal feedback in classroom interaction? (3) What are the problems of teachers' verbal feedback?In this paper, teachers' feedback refers to anything the teacher says after the student answers a question. According to the definition, in the data analysis part, this paper first counts the amount of teachers' feedback, finds that there are differences of the amount in freshmen's classes and sophomores' classes, and discusses the reasons of these phenomena; then divides teachers' feedback from 3 angles-positive feedback and negative feedback from the first angle, communicative feedback and linguistic feedback from the second angle and open feedback and close feedback from the third level and then analyzes the statistics. On the basis of data analysis, this paper first finds 3 characteristics of teachers' feedback-(1) positive feedback is much more than negative feedback, (2) teachers' feedbacks have variety, (3)teachers' feedback has different features in different class patterns; then analyzes teachers' feedback techniques from the aspects of praise, correction and communication; finally concludes the problems in teachers' feedback.In response to these problems, some feasible suggestions are worked out: Teachers should learn theories related to teaching; teachers should improve their language ability; teachers should understand students' level; teachers should give students more opportunities to produce their output; teachers should think adjustment after class.In short, only when the present situation and current problems of teachers' feedback in English majors' comprehensive English class are well understood and the thorough researches in English classroom teaching are conducted, can English teachers for English majors improve their feedback techniques, lead students to participate in class interaction actively and improve the effectiveness of their feedbacks.