A Study Of The Effects Of Teacher Feedback On Learners' Involvement In Vocational College English Classroom

Teacher Feedback is regarded as a significant component of Teacher Talk in foreign language learning and teaching. As an essential part of language teaching process, teacher feedback can organize and assist learners to take part in communicative activities in English class, it also creates opportunities for learners to express themselves thus improve SLA. In classroom teaching context, effective teacher feedback can initiate learners'motivation while inappropriate feedback may affect learners'participation in English class. The present research tries to explore how to adopt teacher feedback effectively to stimulate learner's motivation thus improve their participation in English class. The research questions are:(1) What types of teacher feedback are employed in EFL classrooms in higher vocational college? What are the characteristics of them?(2) What are the learners'attitudes and preferences to different types of teacher feedback?(3) Which kinds of teacher feedback techniques are helpful for promoting learners'participation?The theoretical foundations of this paper include prior studies related to teacher feedback, the Affective Filter Hypothesis, the Mediation Theory and the Interaction Hypothesis. The participants involved in this study are four English teachers and their non-English major students from Zhejiang Technical Institute of Economics. The author conducted the study through classroom observation, recording, interview and questionnaire survey, aiming to find out the learners'attitudes and preferences for teacher feedback, and the actual practice of teacher feedback in English class, so as to help teachers adopt feedback techniques more effectively to improve learners' participation.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, the author found that the teachers adopt a variety of ways of feedback in English class, of which the simple and short praise takes the largest proportion, then follows "Providing a Clue and Expecting Self-repair", the least adopted ways of feedback are criticizing and "Ignoring and Correcting later" At the same time, the data collected from the questionnaire survey and interview demonstrated that students are more receptive to self-repair and implicit corrective feedback. Based on these findings, the author proposed several implications and suggestions:teachers should take the learners' needs into account when providing feedback, as long as the motivations of learners are stimulated by effective teacher feedback, they will actively participate in English class.