A Study Of The Types And Characteristics Of Teacher Feedback In College English Classes

As one important component of teacher talk, teacher feedback plays a crucial role in classroom setting, especially in second language classes. It’s not just a simple response to or evaluation of student’s answer, but also a major source of language input for students. Appropriate feedback can further promote students’ output by generating active, relaxed and supportive environment to involve them into class interaction. Therefore, the study of teacher feedback is of great importance for language teaching and learning.Since Sinclair and Coulthard put forward the famous Initiation-Response-Feedback classroom discourse pattern in1975, systematic study on the feedback move has increased, with the focus on the function and classification of teacher feedback and the application of corrective feedback. In comparison, domestic study in this respect is less developed.This study primarily focuses on the feedback move with the aim of reflecting the actual application of teacher feedback in college English classes. Its data is collected from the most influential SFLEP National College English Teaching Contest, which provides high-quality classes by teachers from all over the country. Through the observation and transcription of15video-recorded classes, this study is to explore specifically the following two questions:(1) What feedback types are employed by college English teachers? What is their frequency and distribution?(2) What are the characteristics of these feedbacks?The major findings are as follow:(1) Totally eight feedback types are observed, namely positive feedback, repetition, recast, elicitation, expansion, probing, explicit correction and self-answering. Their frequencies vary drastically. Positive feedback and repetition are overwhelmingly used while explicit correction and self-answering rank at the bottom.(2) The study demonstrates below characteristics of teacher feedback:a) Praise is used in large quantity but in poor quality, lacking variety, specificity, consistence and credibility. The inappropriate overuse of praise achieves little effect. b) Teachers are cautious towards error correction. They correct less than half of the total errors, emphasizing fluency over accuracy. Comprehension errors and phonological errors are more likely to be corrected and minor grammatical and lexical errors neglected. Moreover, teachers prefer implicit corrective feedback, a variety of techniques are employed to balance the effect of explicit correction. c) The class is more interaction-oriented. Communicative feedback is much more than Linguistic feedback. Besides, the conversation structure in class is no longer dominated by the closed IRF pattern and extended IRF structure increases its share. Open feedback techniques such as probing and elicitation are crucial in generating extended IRF structure and increasing interaction while the overwhelmingly used positive feedback often leads to closed IRF pattern and shut down opportunities for further communication.Based on above findings, some feasible suggestions are put forward:Teachers should study related theory systematically to build up their knowledge of teacher feedback. In practice they should understand students more and target feedback at individual differences, carefully observe class and integrate feedback with context, listen to quality classes by other teachers, review feedback effect regularly and make adjustment accordingly. In addition, teachers should improve their target language proficiency to increase language variety and flexibility, thus creating more learning opportunities for students.