Co-adaptation Of English Majors' Self-concept And Teacher Feedback

Students' self-concept and teacher feedback are two important concepts in foreign language teaching.However,previous researches,most of which are cross-sectional,focused on certain features of either of them respectively,thus failing to capture their dynamic mechanisms or the interrelationships between them.Based on dynamic systems theory,this study explores the co-adaptation of English majors' self-concept and teacher's feedback from a qualitative perspective.The participants of the study are ten English majors from Tianjin University of Technology.The instruments are the introspective interview outline,the classroom observation tally sheet and the feedback dairy,the time lasting one year.Results show that:(1)The teacher's feedbacks are divided into two categories: linguistic feedback and non-linguistic feedback.Linguistic feedback includes pronunciation,vocabulary,syntax,discourse,semantics,and pragmatics,and non-linguistic feedback includes cognitive feedback,affect emotional feedback,and volition feedback;(2)The changing patterns of the students' general self-concepts and sub self-concepts are different during the one year;(3)The students' motivation has an influence on the function of the teacher's feedback.The positive feedback promotes the development of the students' self-concept under the strong motivation.For the unmotivated-orientated students,positive feedback promotes the students' feedback,but the neutral feedback and the negative feedback are useless to the development of students' self-concept.The results prove to be enlightening for foreign language teaching.It is obvious that there is a co-adaptation of students and teacher feedback.What's more,teachers should use positive feedbacks appropriately to promote students' self-concept and maximize their achievement.