| Classroom feedback has a long history with its great importance in teaching andlearning. Teachers can enlighten and organize students to participate in communicativeactivities in classroom by feedback. At the same time students can derive opportunities toimprove their language learning from answering questions. In classroom interaction, teacherfeedback can help students to understand the teaching material better and teachers can alsocorrect students'mistakes through feedback. Effective feedback can stimulate students'studyinterest, but improper feedback may discourage students. Therefore, the study of teacherfeedback is of great importance to language teaching.At present, the researches on teachers'classroom feedback are mainly focused on thedescription of teachers'feedback characteristics. However, there are relatively few studies oncollege English teachers'feedback and students'expectations towards it. Therefore, thisthesis explores the features of college English teachers'classroom feedback and its effects onclassroom interaction through classroom observation, interviews and questionnaires andcomes up with suggestions and implications that may guide teachers to improve theirfeedback behavior.The subjects of the study are a college English teacher and her 108 students from fournon-English major classes from China University of Petroleum. Through observation,recording the author analyzes the teacher feedback in her class from the aspects ofclassifications of feedbacks, the time of teacher feedback, and the time of classroominteraction. In order to see into students'expectations and needs for teacher feedback, afterthe author listened to the teacher'classes, students from four classes filled in thequestionnaires and four of them were interviewed to make up for the questionnaire. Through the comparison of the feedback time and interaction time, we can find that theeffect of teacher feedback towards classroom interaction is obvious and positive feedback canfoster the classroom interaction going smoothly. At the same time, based on the observationof the classroom, it is found that the teacher could use several feedback techniques in theclassroom teaching, however, simple approval is the one that used most and its percentage isfar higher than the other feedback techniques. From the private talk with the students and thequestionnaire, it should be pointed out that the students like the teacher give them positivefeedback which can encourage them to speak and participant. But only simple approval is notenough for them to know more about the question, they want the teacher to give more detailedexplanations and comments. Therefore, there is a gap between the employment of teacherfeedback and the students'expectations, which requires the teacher to pay attention to theusage of the other positive feedback techniques.The results obtained from the experiment are expected to help teachers raise feedbackin more effective ways, contribute to the teacher-student interaction in college Englishclassroom and improve the college English teaching effects. |
