Teacher Feedback And Its Effect On Students’ Affective State In Junior English Class

With the development of humanism, affective factors of students have been paid more and more attention. Both cognitive factors and affective factors bring important influence on students’ learning. Feedback as one part of teacher talk has influence on students’ affective state in a great degree.The junior stage is the important period of students’ emotional development, so this paper took four junior English teachers from Tianjin No.78Middle School and their142students in Grade1as subjects. This research, based on the Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Humanistic Perspectives, tries to find the general situation of teacher feedback practice, the categories of teacher feedback frequently used and their implementation, the preference feedback of students as well as different effect on students’affect from different teacher feedback in junior English class with the methods of classroom observation, audio-recording, questionnaire and interview.By means of researches and analysis of data, this paper has mainly concluded that (1) Oral feedback in junior English classes is likely to be dominant; The general feedback and specific ones given by teachers are always mixed together; Teachers prefer to give feedback by interrupting a students’ talking, while students do not like this way.(2) Both teachers and students have taken the feedback as an essential way of communicating the information of language learning and providing with language input. Teachers have paid much attention to grammatical forms during communicative interactions rather than forms isolation.(3) Teachers are accustomed to giving simple praise; but students prefer to get elaborate praise to learn about their strong points detailedly.(4) When students give answer unsatisfactorily or even cannot work out the answer, teachers have noticed to give indirect or implicit feedback to guide students or ask another one to answer instead.(5) It exists the ambiguity in feedback which makes students at least feel confused, a little anxious, decrease a little interest or lose a little confidence.(6) Positive feedback can inspirit students so that they will enhance their confidence, increase motivation and interests in English learning. However, negative feedback always makes students feel frustrated, embarrassed, as well as losing confidence, interest or motivation.According to what have been concluded, the author put forward the following advice:giving feedback as language input should be a slightly higher than students’ current language level; giving students more self-correction rather than explicit correction with criticism; no interrupting and no correcting any possible error; adopting more elaborate praise and using non-verbal feedback to avoid the ambiguous of feedback.