A Study On Excellent English Teachers’ Verbal Feedback In Junior Middle School EFL Classes

The present study seeks to explore types and characteristics of excellent English teachers’verbal feedback, and at the same time describe how excellent teachers use feedback to promote classroom interaction. The study is expected to answer the following two questions:1. What are the different types of verbal feedback employed by the excellent English teachers?2. What are the characteristics of verbal feedback employed by the excellent English teachers?Based on Krashen’s input hypothesis, Swain’s output hypothesis and Long’s interactive hypothesis, the present study was conducted with the corpus of 35000 words or so through video-observation, data-marking and data-transcription by drawing the data from eight English teaching videos of "renowned teachers from Zhejiang province and the whole country" of 2014, and the interviews with four excellent English teachers. Through qualitative and data analysis, it arrives at the following tentative conclusions:Firstly,8 different types of single feedback and 13 types of multiple feedback are employed by the eight excellent English teachers in all the eight classes. Among all the 8 types of single feedback, positive feedback and elicitation take up 12.8% and 12.64% respectively, which are much higher than any other single types. Among all the 13 types of multiple feedback, repetition along with positive feedback takes the highest proportion,9.72%, which is followed by repetition along with follow-up questions, which contains 5.02%.Secondly, the characteristics of teacher feedback employed by the excellent teachers lie in three aspects:(a) the comprehensive and tactful employment of both simple feedback and multiple feedback, (b) much more focus on meaning and (c) its tendency to develop continuous IRF structure.Thirdly, the excellent teachers tend to learn more theories about teacher feedback and reflect the feedback in their own classes autonomously so that they can polish and then improve the quality of their feedback.The results will shed some light on language teaching. First and foremost, English teachers are recommended to employ various feedback types comprehensively and skillfully according to the learning objectives in different types of English classes. In addition, teachers should focus more on the meaning of the students’utterances and appropriate focus on form is also necessary on the premise that the meaning is paid attention to firstly. What’s more, teachers should tactfully make the most use of the interrelationship within the three moves of IRF turns so that continuous IRF structure can be developed to facilitate the classroom teacher-student interaction. Finally, in terms of career development, teachers should not only enrich theoretical knowledge about feedback, but also reflect the feedback in their own classes to polish it and then improve the quality of their feedback.Nevertheless, the present study involves only eight classes and four teachers, which allows the author to draw tentative conclusions. In addition, the depth of the research questions needs to be improved and the instruments should be diversified. There are many limitations of this study, therefore further research are urgently expected.