Student Response To Teacher Feedback In The EFL Classroom

In language classroom settings,teacher feedback can not only provide useful information to support students' learning,but also create opportunities for them to communicate in the target language.However,most teachers' feedback currently follows the Initiation-Response-Feedback(IRF)sequence(Sinclair&Coulthard,1975)with little emphasis placed on the follow-up student response to feedback.Therefore,some scholars point out that feedback needs to be more interactive and students'responses to feedback should be emphasized so that the mutual understanding between teachers and students can be improved and students' language abilities can be better developed.Currently,most of the researches on feedback have centered on teachers.Although in recent years,scholars have turned their attention to students(Cowie,2005;Liu,2010;Olmerzer-Oztiirk&Ozturk,2016),most student-oriented researches have been focusing on students' preferences for feedback and their perceptions of it.Very little is known about how students respond to feedback in class.Therefore,a total of 315 freshmen from 9 classes of College English IV Course in Zhejiang University(ZJU for short)were selected as the subjects of this research.The data was collected through classroom observations,stimulated recall interviews,a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews.Based on the data,students'attitudes to responding to feedback,and the characteristics of their responses,including recurring patterns of response,types of response,length of response and possible underlying reasons were explored.The findings of the research revealed that though students highly valued the act of responding to feedback,they did not make responses very actively.Both verbal response and no response were common recurring patterns of response in class.Nonetheless,a small number of students were accustomed to responding to feedback in a non-verbal way and most of the students tended to send non-verbal messages first when they had doubts about the feedback or when they had something else to share.In terms of types of response,most of the students' responses were in the forms of simple acknowledgement and expansion which mainly focused on the exchange of information.As for length of response,a large percentage of responses were short.How students made responses were greatly influenced by the received types of feedback,yet it was also related to other factors like length of feedback,teachers' ways of questioning,students' language proficiency or personality.Finally,although students responded favorably to their teachers' feedback,they also showed their expectations for teachers to improve their feedback,for example,by paying more attention to their non-verbal responses.On the whole,though the research is just an initial exploratory research based on college English teaching in ZJU,it still reveals some typical problems in the college English class and hence can give directions to the improvement of college English teaching.Finally,some limitations of the research in terms of data collection and the timing of classroom observations should be avoided in future research so that more information about students' responses can be gathered to help improve college English teaching.