A Corpus-based Comparative Study On Teachers' Feedbacks In English Classrooms Of Urban And Rural Senior High Schools

In senior high school English classrooms,teachers' feedbacks can not only play a role as an important comprehensible language input,but also promote students' language output,thus facilitating the interaction between teachers and students.This research aims to examine teachers' feedbacks in urban and rural senior high school English classrooms,and to identify some similarities and differences between the two kinds of classrooms.Based upon the similarities and differences,this study explores some effective types of teachers' feedbacks and strategies.The data of this study are drawn from a small-scale corpus containing twenty English classes from urban and rural schools in South Central China.This study chose eight English classes from this corpus,with four classes from urban schools and the other four from rural schools.This study identified the types and frequencies of teachers' feedbacks,and explored their different effects with examples on classroom interaction between the two kinds of schools.According to the results,this study finds the number of teachers' feedbacks(48%)in the urban schools is a little larger than that(34%)in the rural schools.In addition,the study also finds that recast,elicitation and guided self revision regarded as some of the most effective strategies are frequently used by urban teachers.However,simple praise,repetition plus praise and explicit correction are generally given by rural teachers.Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis,it is also found that there are some similarities of teachers' feedbacks between two kinds of English classrooms.The teachers in both the urban schools and rural schools payed more attention to their uses of feedbacks than before.They didn't only provide monologues to deliver knowledge to students any more,but organized more classroom interactions and gave feedbacks towards students' replies so as to constantly promote classroom teaching;Simple praise was one of the most frequently used ones by the teachers of the two school types;Nearly all of the teachers tended to give positive feedbacks rather than negative ones.In conclusion,teachers who adopt various effective feedback strategies will help students to produce more language output,thus promoting classroom interaction.Based on the above findings,several implications are provided for effective classroom pedagogical practices,especially in terms of teachers' feedbacks.(1)Teachers should constantly reflect on their own use of feedbacks,because only by the full awareness of their preferences and habits,will they improve the quality of teachers' feedback.(2)Teachers should improve the way of using feedbacks and adopt different kinds of feedbacks to provide more opportunities for students to produce language output.(3)Teachers should try their best to create a meaningful and active classroom atmosphere rather than to give mechanic and insignificant responses or too simple feedbacks.(4)Teachers should take students' emotions and demands into consideration,and provide appropriate classroom interactions.