A Study On Teachers' Verbal Feedback In English Teaching Of Junior Middle Schools

In junior middle schools English teaching is mainly launched and carried forward by a series of discourses including teacher's initiation, student's response and teacher's follow-up. Teacher's follow-up discourse refers to teacher's verbal feedback on student's response to his questions. According to different focuses, teacher's follow-up discourse can be divided into three categories: content feedback, form feedback and theme feedback. The objective of this study is to investigate the features and distribution of teacher's verbal feedback in junior middle school EFL classroom, in the hope that English teachers may realize the importance and complexity of verbal feedback in classroom teaching, and thus improve their own English teaching efficiency.Through classroom observation and audio-transcription, the present author has analyzed 12 periods of English classes from the corpus data, in terms of the features and distribution of teacher's verbal feedback in English classroom, and elaborated the strategies of teacher's verbal feedback.The result of the study shows that: teachers have paid high attention to their own verbal feedback because they realize proper verbal feedback can improve students' spoken English extraordinarily; teachers have been able to integrate different kinds of feedback strategies; teachers have focused on the contents and meaning of the students' response discourse through performing negotiation of meaning and theme feedback; teachers have created the supportive atmosphere that can encourage students to express themselves and involve classroom interaction.In short, English teacher's sensitivity of verbal feedback and application of various techniques of verbal feedback can help students to be more involved in English classroom activities, and thus promote the quality and quantity of students' target language.