A Comparative Study Of Teachers' Verbal Feedback Between Novice Teachers And Expert Teachers In English Classroom Of Senior High Schools

Classroom teaching is an interactive process and many scholars have stressed that classroom interaction facilitates language acquisition.Early in the 1970 s,Sinclair and Coulthard put forward the classical interaction model and divide classroom discourse into I(initiation)-R(response)-F(feedback).From language input to language output,teachers' feedback is an indispensable chain in the process of language acquisition.With adequate feedback from teachers,students obtain more language input.They are able to overcome communicative obstacles with the help of teacher and intake the language.Due to lack of teaching experience,novice teachers usually cannot give suitable feedback to students' utterances.Thus,this study is designed to compare the differences as well as similarities between novice teachers and expert teachers in terms of teachers' feedback.It is hoped that teachers can be enlightened from the study to improve their quality and quantities of feedback.The subjects of this study are five novice teachers and five expert teachers that come from five senior high schools in Hebei Province.This study takes Lian Rong and Meng Yingfang's(2004)classifications of teachers for reference to define expert teachers and Yu Guoliang's(1999)classification to select novice teachers.In other words,teachers who have at least fifteen years of teaching experience with a senior professional title are expert teachers,while those with less than two years of teaching experience are novice teachers.In this study,the video-recording method is used to collect data.Each teacher is videotaped for three lessons randomly and altogether 30 lessons are included in this study.Then,based on the research questions,the nine types of single feedback and seven types of mixed feedback proposed by Lin Zhengjun and Zhou Sha(2011)are adopted as the classification of teachers' feedback in this study.Then,transcripts of the 30 classes are analyzed with the help of Excel 2003 and SPSS.Through transcription and analysis,the findings are shown as follows: Firstly,in terms of types of feedback,both novice teachers and expert teachers are able to use the nine types of single feedback and seven types of mixed feedback in their teaching.Secondly,in terms of amount of teachers' feedback,there is a significant difference between novice teachersand expert teachers.Besides,expert teachers can use more feedback compared with novice ones.Thirdly,in terms of distribution of types of teachers' feedback,both novice teachers and expert teachers show emphasis on the use of single feedback.And they have respective advantages on the adoption of each type of feedback.Based on the findings of the research,some pedagogical implications on teachers' feedback are put forward.Novice teachers and expert teachers should realize the importance of teachers' feedback and pay enough attention to the employment of it.In addition,novice teachers and expert teachers should use various types of teachers' feedback flexibly.Moreover,novice teachers and expert teachers have respective advantages,so they ought to communicate and learn from each other so as to promote their effectiveness of feedback.