A Study On Excellent English Teachers' Feedback In Classroom Interaction

Teacher feedback,as a part of teacher talk,plays an important role in the process of teaching.Especially,teacher feedback in the classroom interaction provides opportunities for students to promote their language acquisition.The author chose six awarded junior high school English teachers as the research subjects to study their feedback.The analysis and discussion centered on the types and distribution features of teacher feedback,the influence of teacher feedback on students' speech output and classroom interaction,and some other characteristics of those teachers' feedback.The author observed the six teachers' teaching videos,transcribed the videos and then analyzed the teacher feedback in classroom interaction mainly with the help of interaction hypothesis and error treatment theory.The major findings of this study are listed as follows:1.Generally,English teachers use more positive feedback than negative feedback.Of all those three strategies of positive feedback,simple positive feedback is used most frequently.As for the six strategies of negative feedback given by those six teachers,recast is the most often employed while repetition and metalinguistic feedback are the least often used.2.The teachers conduct more positive feedback to encourage students to produce output and participate in the interaction.And they employ the corrective feedback flexibly and effectively with the consideration of the characteristics of the students to promote students' uptakes.Meanwhile,they try to take into account the emotion of the students during the process of correction in order to reduce its bad influence.3.There are two main other characteristics in the teachers' feedback: a.the expressions in some teachers' feedback are diverse and proper,which is conducive to motivating the students to participate in interactions.b.the corrective feedback conducted by some teachers are delayed in some situations,which can help to guarantee the smooth output of the students and correct the language errors of the students as well.Based on the research findings and the relevant theoretical foundations,four suggestions are put forward to English teachers in junior high school.Firstly,they should be aware of the importance of teacher feedback,use more positive feedback and give negative feedback appropriately.Secondly,they should use more positive feedback with elicitation and use some of negative feedback types flexibly in order to increase students' output and the classroom interaction.Thirdly,they should be ableto recognize the students' errors and weigh if they should conduct the corrective feedback according to the teaching objectives.Fourthly,they should use diverse and specific expressions when giving feedback.