Influence Of Teachers' Feedback On The College English Classroom Interaction

Teacher feedback, one component of teacher talk, is explored as the medium of classroom interaction in this study. A lot of researches have given us evidence suggesting that successful language learning immensely depends on the type of classroom interaction specifically, which constitutes a facilitative environment both for learners'exposure to comprehensible input and their production of modified output.This dissertation regards social interaction theory as the main theoretical foundation. The interaction theory is an important concept of SLA under the condition of classroom, which involves the relationship between language input and language output. Teacher feedback is the important factor of classroom interaction, namely teacher's comment response for the learner's verbal performance. The key idea of social interaction is the intermediary. In language classroom, teacher feedback naturally is the important media of the teacher-student interaction. Therefore, in foreign language classroom, the teacher, as the intermediary person, promotes the classroom teaching through the verbal interaction, including the classroom interaction. Based on the analysis of numerous literatures, the study reported in this dissertation is out of the concern of the author as a language learner about the problem of EFL classroom interaction and her research interest in teacher feedback as a vital aspect of Teacher Talk to show the influence of teachers'feedback techniques on the classroom interaction through classroom observation, recording and interview. Through the data analysis, this paper mainly found out the results of three research questions. It concluded the characteristics of teacher feedback in college English class and the teacher feedback techniques and how these techniques influenced the classroom interaction. Finally, the learner's preference towards teacher feedback is also analyzed in this paper.Based on the data analysis, it is found that teachers, in many cases, pay attention to the feedback more or less in class. Although teachers could use some teacher feedback techniques to encourage students, teachers are lacking of the systematical theory about teacher feedback. Teachers do not recognize that teacher feedback plays an important role in helping to foster the classroom interaction. The positive feedback can foster the classroom interaction. Students in college English classroom, whatever the top ones or the underachieving ones, all prefer to the positive teacher feedback. They expect the relaxed and active learning environment. They think positive teacher feedback can make them confident in their performance in English class.The implications are in the following three aspects: teachers should adopt feedback techniques that (1) provide more comprehensible TL input; (2) create opportunities for negotiation; (3) challenge learners to draw on their own linguistic resources.