A Study Of Classroom Feedback From Excellent English Teachers In Junior Middle Schools

Teacher’s feedback refers to the evaluative information that reflects the completion of students’ learning tasks for the purpose of improving students’ learning.Teacher’s classroom feedback can not only give the students timely and appropriate evaluation,but also stimulate the students’ interest in speaking English.Based on the input hypothesis,the output hypothesis and the interaction hypothesis,this research gives a detailed analysis and discussion on the excellent junior middle school English teachers’ classroom feedback.The author puts forward three research questions: 1)What are the types of the classroom feedback employed by the excellent junior middle school English teachers? 2)What are the characteristics of the classroom feedback employed by the excellent junior middle school English teachers? 3)How does the excellent junior middle school English teachers’ classroom feedback influence the students’ speech output? The author randomly selected ten teachers from The 10 th National Demonstration Junior English Classroom Teaching Cases held in Xi’an in October 2014 as research subjects.The instrument of this research is the video including many excellent junior middle school English teachers’ demonstrations classes.The findings of the study are shown as follows: 1)We found that these ten excellent junior middle school English teachers have two types of classroom feedback---single feedback and mixed feedback.Nine kinds of them are single feedback,including positive feedback,evaluation,extension,recast,repetition,clarification request,elicitation,explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback.Five kinds of them are mixed feedback,including positive feedback plus evaluation,positive feedback plus recast,positive feedback plus repetition,repetition plus extension,and repetition plus evaluation.2)The characteristics of classroom feedback in excellent junior middle school English teachers mainly include the following five aspects.Firstly,different kinds of feedback in class differ from each other in their distribution.There are four kinds of single feedback with higher frequency of use.They are positive feedback,repetition,elicitation and explicit correction,which are the top four in this study.As for mixed feedback,the top two with higher frequency are positive feedback plus repetition and positive feedback plus recast.Secondly,in the class of excellent junior middle school English teachers,the interaction between teachers and students is dominated by the separate IRF model,most of which end up with the teacher’s feedback,while the constant IRF has a low frequency,which is about one third of the former.Thirdly,we found that both in terms of feedback type and the frequency of feedback,English teachers from different excellent junior middle school differ from each other in the use of feedback,which are influenced by their teaching style and teaching ability.Fourthly,the application of different types of classroom feedback is associated with different classroom designs and class types.In terms of the class type of this study,the frequency of the use of teachers’ classroom feedback in different classes has ranked respectively as grammar class,listening and speaking class,reading class,and comprehensive practice class,based on the descending order of their frequency.Fifthly,excellent junior middle school English teachers also have differences in teachers’ classroom feedback content in class,who lay importance on the form,such as grammar,vocabulary and pronunciation,ignoring the feedback on meaning,namely content evaluation or expansion.3)In order to bring out the students’ language output more effectively,teachers should use elicitation,explicit correction,clarification request and recast,avoiding positive feedback and repetition as far as possible.Elicitation can help students make more discourse output,which is the most effective teachers’ classroom feedback.Teachers should try to use elicitation feedback as much as possible.In the end,we hope that this study will benefit the junior middle school English teachers in improving classroom feedback and improving their classroom teaching quality and efficiency.