The Influences Of Teachers’ Classroom Feedback On Students’Contributions

In recent years, more and more researchers have paid their attention to teacherfeedback study. Teacher feedback, as an important comprehensible input for students, notonly is an evaluation on students’ classroom answers but also elicits more talking turnsfrom the teacher and students, which can provide students with more communicatingopportunities. The appropriate classroom feedback strategies can make the classroominteraction between the teacher and students longer, thus is very helpful for studentslanguage improvement in the long run. From this perspective, the present research makesa further step to explore how teachers’ classroom feedback strategies influence students’classroom contributions.Based on the Conversational Analysis, input and output theories as well as classroominteraction modification theory, the present study has investigated the influences ofteachers’ classroom feedback strategies on students’ classroom contributions. With acombination of quantitative and qualitative study, the study applies a triangular method ofclassroom observation, questionnaire and interview, and randomly selects Non-Englishmajor freshmen of four classes from a famous Hebei-based university and their Englishteachers as subjects, trying to explore:(1) the type of classroom feedback strategies thatteachers use in their classroom and teachers’ perception of classroom feedback;(2)students’ perception of feedback effects on their classroom contributions;(3) howteachers’ classroom feedback strategies influence students’ classroom contributions. Thepresent study has drawn the following conclusions:From the perspective of teacher feedback strategies effects on students’ errorcorrection, repetition and recast, though were used relatively frequently in the classroomobservation, are found not very effective in bringing successful contributions fromstudents. While, explicit correction, elicitation and clarification request though used lessby teacher participants are found to be more effective in terms of generating correctcontributions from students. From the perspective of providing students with more talkingturns, positive feedback like back-channel and approval (repetition of students’ answer or repetition with simple approval) are found to elicit more classroom contributions fromstudents, thus are more favorable to provide students with more communicationopportunities.The above conclusion will not only be a guide for further study in teacher classroomfeedback, but also provide some useful suggestions for teachers and students to makefeedback strategies more effective in the classroom.