A Contrastive Analysis Of Teacher Feedback In Rural And Urban Junior English Class

This study investigates teacher feedback in two different areas of Shanxi Province andits effects on Chinese EFL learners. One of the investigated schools is a junior school in ruralarea, and the other one is a junior school in urban area. This research focuses on the followingresearch questions.1) What are the types of teacher feedbacks offered by teachers of differentteaching experience?2) What are the types of teacher feedbacks offered by teachers ofdifferent education backgrounds?3) How do these types of feedbacks affect classroomteaching?The subjects in this study involve all the teachers in Grade Two of these two schools.The research method employed in this study is video observation. In the video observation,teacher feedbacks are transcribed and marked on the basis of the researcher’s carefulobservation. And then, according to the basic information of teachers, it can be found that theinvestigated teachers are different in teaching years and education backgrounds. So theresearch is designed to make contrast in two aspects, one is about the similarities anddifferences of feedback used by teachers with same teaching experience, and the other one isabout similarities and differences of feedback used by teachers with same educationbackground.The major findings can be summarized as follows:Firstly, from the collected data, the following similarities of teacher feedback use can beconcluded.1) The approval feedback, especially the simple approval feedback, is frequentlyused by most teachers, indicating that this type of feedback is the first choice of manyteachers, but it is not the most effective feedback in language teaching. It is usually used byteachers as a strategy to keep the verbal interaction going on in classroom teaching.2) On thecontrary, elicitation feedback is least used by most teachers, and this kind of feedback isfrequently used in Chinese.3) Nearly all of the teachers in this study tend to use simpleapproval feedback followed by repetition feedback or vice versa.Secondly, on the basis of collected data, some differences in teacher feedback use can be found as follows：1) Besides simple approval feedback, the teachers who do not have abachelor’s degree in rural area are likely to use explicit correction feedback, while the othersalways tend to use repetition feedback.2) Teachers who have a bachelor’s degree or master’sdegree in urban area are likely to use elicitation feedback because the learners in the urbanschool have a better English level than learners in the rural school..Pedagogically, student-centered classroom teaching demands that a good teacher shouldtake the learners’ needs into consideration when providing different kinds of feedbacks. Aproper use or misuse of teacher feedback may make a large difference in learners’ secondlanguage acquisition. It is hoped that the research can provide some useful advice to teachersin classroom teaching.