A Study On Teachers' Verbal Feedback In English Teaching Of Senior High Schools Based On Speech Act Theory

For Chinese learners,foreign language classroom provides the most authentic environment for language learning.As the major source and medium of learners' target language input,teachers' discourse plays a significant role in both classroom organization and learners' acquisition.Teachers' follow-up move refers to teachers' verbal feedback on students' responses or behaviors.As a vital section of classroom discourse,teachers' verbal feedback is not only part of learners' comprehensible input,but also an effective stimulus to their output.Based on classroom observation and corpus analysis,the present author has probed into 10 periods of model lessons from EFL classrooms in senior high schools,in terms of the features and distribution of teachers' verbal feedback and the elaboration of communicative feedback strategies from the perspective of Speech Act Theory.The aim of the study is to generalize different influences of classroom feedback on learners' cognition and emotion,as well as to put forward several constructive suggestions for English teachers,exploring the potential to facilitate or increase the input and output opportunities for target language learners.The result shows that: in the model lessons,the teachers have been able to integrate all sorts of feedback strategies according to real contexts to help students overcome the communication obstacles and obtain the form of language;teachers have focused on the contents and meanings of the students' responses through the negotiation of meaning;teachers have preference on content and theme feedback,in which the strategies of repetition,induction,recast and tracing questions are the most popular.The study also reveals that several deficiencies exist and thereby some constructive advice for improvement has been put forward,in the hope that English teachers may realize the importance and complexity of verbal feedback and adjust their discourse accordingly.By monitoring and reflecting their use of language,English teachers may create more possibilities for students' learning and classroom participation,and consequently achieve the overall success of senior high school English teaching.