A Study On Teacher Feedback In English Classroom Interaction In Senior High School

Under the background of new curriculum reform, students’ communicative abilities are paid increasing attention, and thus teacher talk requires a higher level. Teacher feedback, as a significant part of teacher talk, is not only a communication bridge between teachers and students, but an important factor in influencing students’ classroom input and output. Therefore, it is meaningful to conduct an in-depth and detailed investigation on teacher feedback in classroom interaction. After consulting the relevant literature, it is found that so far, the western scholars have conducted some in-depth studies of teacher feedback, but few are related to the actual situation of Chinese English class. While domestic researches in this area start late and the studies mainly focus on college or junior middle school, but the research directed towards the senior high school is relatively less. Therefore, the author conducted an in-depth survey of the teacher feedback of four excellent English teachers of Anyang No. 1 senior high school. In the meantime, through the classroom observation, the thesis adopts the classification of Nunan(1991) to divide teacher feedback into positive feedback and negative feedback. The study mainly focuses on the following research questions:(1) What is the distribution of positive feedback and negative feedback used by the excellent Englishteachers in the senior high school?(2) What are the strategies of positive feedback and negative feedback employed by the excellent Englishteachers in the senior high school? What is the distribution of them?(3) What is the influence of the different feedback strategies on learners’ oral output and the Englishclassroom interaction?(4) What are the attitudes of teachers and students towards teacher feedback?The study selects four excellent English teachers and their students in Anyang No.1 senior high school as the research subjects. Meanwhile, based on the theories of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Long’s Interaction Hypothesis and Swan’s Output Hypothesis, the study conducted an investigation of the actual use of excellent senior English teachers for teacher feedback and the attitudes of teachers and students toward teacher feedback in order to obtain some revelation about how to improve teacher feedback. To achieve the aims of this study, some feasible methods are employed in the study, including classroom observation and classroom recording of the four teachers’ 8 lessons, interviews for the four teachers, and questionnaires for students.Through the analysis of SPSS13.0 for the collected data, some conclusions can be reached as follows:(1) The senior excellent teachers tend to adopt positive feedback, for it can protect students’ self-esteem and meanwhile create a favorable classroom atmosphere for students’ classroom interaction. However, negative feedback plays an indispensable role in students’ error correction and learning reinforcement, and thus it is also frequently used by teachers as well.(2) Teachers employ various feedback strategies in positive feedback and negative feedback. Through classroom observation, it is summarized in the study that the feedback strategies of positive feedback include simple approval, expansion and questioning, among which simple approval is most frequently employed by teachers; while the strategies of negative feedback have explicit correction, recast, elicitation, repetition, metal-linguistic feedback and clarification request, among which recast is most frequently used by teachers.(3) Different feedback strategies have different influence on learners’ oral output and classroom interaction. Questioning is the most contributive to learners’ oral output in the strategies of positive feedback; while in the strategies of negative feedback, recast is more contributive to learners’ output than the others.(4) Both teachers and students recognize the importance of teacher feedback. Through the interviews for teachers and the questionnaires for the students, it can be found that both teachers and students prefer the form of positive feedback, which is consistent with the results of classroom observation.Finally, according to the research results, some meaningful pedagogical implications can be obtained: At first, various strategies of positive feedback should be used in the teaching classroom; then, the implicit strategies of negative feedback should be used when correcting students’ mistakes; besides, proper strategies of teacher feedback are used flexibly to contribute to the learners’ output and classroom interaction; finally, action research should be used by teachers to reflect on their teacher feedback.