A Study On Teacher’s Verbal Feedback In Middle School English Classrooms

As a crucial component of teacher talk, teacher feedback is a key factor for teachers’classroom management and for students’ development. Appropriate teacher feedback can notonly contribute to providing important input resources for students but also promoting students’language output through teacher-student interaction. While improper teacher feedback may missthe valuable chances to facilitate students’ language improvement and even dampen students’enthusiasm for language learning. Thus, the research on teacher verbal feedback is of greatsignificance for improving classroom instruction.The new round of basic education curriculum reform requires teachers to change theirtraditional concept of education, to respect students’ predominant status in classroom and adoptproper feedback strategies so as to stimulate students’ active participation. When reviewing thedomestic researches on teacher verbal feedback, it is evident that the related studies mainly focuson university and college stages. In contrast, fewer studies are carried out on teacher feedback ofmiddle school English classroom.Hence, this paper focuses on teacher feedback in junior English classroom. It adoptsCullen’s (2002) classification for feedback types and takes Krashen’s Input hypothesis, Swain’sOutput hypothesis as well as the scaffold theory as the theoretical support. Through threeresearch methods, including classroom observations, questionnaires and interviews, this thesisintends to answer the following questions:1. What are the characteristics of teacher verbal feedback in Junior English classrooms? What’sthe proportion of evaluative feedback and discoursal feedback?2. What strategies are employed for teacher feedback?3. What are the functions of teacher’s verbal feedback?4. What are teachers and students’attitudes and preferences toward teacher’s feedback?By means of the quantitative and qualitative analysis and discussion, some research resultscan be concluded as the following: First, as for teacher feedback types in the investigated middleschool, it is obvious that teachers provide evaluative feedback much more frequently than thediscoursal feedback. The usage of evaluative feedback occupies for more than80%of allfeedbacks. Besides, teachers adopt different strategies to realize different aims in terms ofvarious situations. The strategies like approval, simple praise, repetition and comment followedby praise are usually adopted when teachers giving positive feedback toward students’ performances. The negative feedback strategies used by the teachers consist of two categories:explicit correction and implicit correction. As for discoursal feedback, strategies likereformulation, elaboration, repetition and comment are employed to encourage the students toactively participate in the classroom interactions. Furthermore, by using different but appropriatefeedback strategies, teachers can set up the cognitive scaffold or affective scaffold to helpstudents perform better. It is evident that evaluative feedback and discoursal feedback havediverse but complementary scaffold functions in the practice. In addition, the proper feedbackcan bring students comprehensible input, arouse more student output and get the students moremotivated in classroom interactions. Finally, although teachers and students have noticed theimportant place of feedback, they hold some different opinions in some aspects.This study holds that the application of teacher feedback actually is the mirror of teachers’educational theory, PCK Knowledge and experiences. And, the process of improving theeffectiveness of feedback will be beneficial for teachers to create effective classroom and fulfilltheir professional development. However, as for the application of teacher verbal feedback inEnglish Classroom investigated, there are still some defects. Therefore, further efforts onimproving the feedback effects are still greatly desired. On the one hand, teachers should makefull use of the functions of the two feedback types, namely, the evaluative feedback anddiscoursal feedback based on a reasonable choice. The focus should not only be given tolanguage forms but also the content. And the opportunities for students to participate classroominteractions and meaningful communications should be guaranteed. On the other hand, it isnecessary for teachers to tailor the feedback strategies and scaffolds responding to students’characters and present cognitive situation as well as their changing needs throughout the teachingand learning process. Of course, the mechanical and inflexible feedback ways should be avoided.Accordingly, teachers are required to polish their knowledge about teaching theories, follow thestudent-centered policy when offering instructions and reflect timely and critically based on theirown feedback practice. It is honestly expected that this study can provide theoretical andpractical support for the feedback research.