A Study Of Teacher Feedback In College English Classroom Interacion

Teacher feedback, one component of teacher talk, is explored as themedium of classroom interaction in this study. A lot of researches have givenus evidence suggesting that successful language learning immensely dependson the type of classroom interaction specifically, which constitutes afacilitative environment both for learners' exposure to comprehensible inputand their production of modified output.Although there have been lots of studies on teacher feedback in theWest, little has been done in the context of China. Aiming to examine howteacher feedback facilitates learners' language development in classroominteraction, this paper first tentatively identifies and discusses six types ofteacher feedback on the basis of data from classroom observationsupplemented with a questionnaire. And then extends a study of correctivefeedback therein discussed by assessing the effectiveness of correctivefeedback in encouraging learner uptake (immediate learner responses). Anaturalistic enquiry approach adopted by most classroom researchers was alsoconducted in the classroom observation. The transcripts totalingapproximately 300 minutes came from six audio- and video-recorded lessonsfrom six different English teachers of non-English undergraduates in CentralSouth University. Qualitative method together with quantitative method was adopted in the study.From the classroom observation and data analyses, findings in atwofold aspect are finally obtained: (1) as regards types of teacher feedback,this study coded 379 turns containing teacher feedback, in which six typeswere identified, i. e. simple approval, expansion, recast, negotiation ofmeaning, prompt, and explicit correction in decreasing order of frequency;whereas learners tended to accept all types except explicit correction,particularly with a preference for recast and expansion; (2) in terms of therelationship between corrective feedback and learner uptake, half of learners'erroneous utterances received teachers' corrective feedback, 52% of which ledto learner uptake, and 33% led to learner repair. Prompt was significantlymore effective than the far more frequent type-recast in encouraging learnerrepair, especially learner-generated repair; whereas recast was proved to beeffective as scaffolding of those linguistic forms beyond learners' repertoire.The implications are in the following three aspects: teachers shouldadopt feedback techniques that (1) provide more comprehensible TL input;(2) create opportunities for negotiation; (3) challenge learners to draw on theirown linguistic resources.