An Investigation Of Teacher Feedback In Comprehensive English Classroom

Teacher feedback, as an important part of Teacher talk (TT) plays a crucial role inthe organization of classroom and the Process of acquisition. In this paper, teacherfeedback refers to teachers’ responses to any students’ answers, which includesverbal-feedback and non-verbal feedback. Teacher feedback researches mainlyconcern two aspects: the early researches put focus on the description of the featuresof teacher feedback; and then greater attention has been shown to the function ofteacher feedback, that is, how teacher feedback promotes classroom interaction andthus affects learners’ language acquisition. This thesis is based on the related studiesfrom both at home and abroad, and takes input hypothesis, output hypothesis andinteraction hypothesis in second language acquisition as criteria for evaluating theeffectiveness of teacher feedback. Interaction theory involves the relationship betweenlanguage input and language output, so it is an important concept of SLA under thecondition of classroom. Teacher feedback, as the important media of theteacher-student interaction, helps students to correct their mistakes and provides targetlanguage input to students.In this paper, the researcher collects the data through classroom video-recording,student interview and teacher interview, and thus explores the close relationshipbetween teacher feedback and second language acquisition. One English teacher andher two English major’s classes are chosen as research subjects. Six periods ofcomprehensive English classes are recorded in these two classes and then transcribedinto texts. On the basis of the genuine data, this research tries to find answers to thefollowing three questions:(l) What are the characteristics of teacher feedback incomprehensive English class?(2) What feedback techniques can teachers adopt andhow these feedback techniques influence classroom interaction?(3) What problemsof teacher feedback exist in English classroom interaction? According to the data of classroom video-recordings and interviews for theteacher and students, the researcher first identifies six types of teacher feedback:simple approval, explicit correction, expansion, elicitation, implicit correction andcriticism. In addition, the characteristics of teacher feedback are concluded in threepoints: variety, unbalanced distribution of different kinds of teacher feedback andeffectiveness of teacher feedback. Besides, according to different teaching goals, theresearcher discusses teacher feedback technique from four branches: agreement,communication, correction, and termination. In addition, some common non-verbalfeedback techniques as complementary instruments to verbal feedback techniques arealso discussed in detail in this paper, such as proximity, eye contact, facial expression,and gesture movement. Based on the real classroom observation, the researcheridentifies three main problems, namely lacking of enough comprehensible input,lacking of ample opportunities for negotiation, and high frequent use of simpleapproval.In order to build a good classroom interaction in practice, the researcher putsforward some feasible suggestions and implications for English teachers and schoolsat the end of the thesis. For examples, teachers should learn theories related toteaching and learning; teachers should improve their language ability; teachers shouldunderstand students’ personal factors, psychological situation, culture background andso on; Besides, as for schools, they need to organize more training activities forteachers, control the size of each class, set up proper course schedules for each teacheras well.