An Investigation Of Students’ Attitudes And Preferences Toward Teacher Feedback In Junior High School English Classroom

In English classroom teaching,teachers’ classroom discourse is not only a tool for teachers to organize the whole classes,but also a key source for students’ language input,which plays a very important role in students’ language acquisition process.As a part of the teachers’ classroom discourse,the teacher feedback can provide evaluation about the students’ performance in the classroom,it can increase the interaction between teachers and students as well as promoting the students’ language acquisition level.However,most English teachers choose to focus more on how to effectively complete the teaching content so as to achieve the teaching goals,and neglect the power of teacher feedback on students in the current teaching situation of junior middle school English classroom in China.Therefore,it is particularly necessary to investigate the usage of teacher feedback in junior high school English classes.This study is based on Krashen’s Input Comprehension Hypothesis,Long’s Interaction Hypothesis and Vygotsky’s Scaffolding Theory,taking 4 English teachers and 170 students as the research object at Weinan Gaoxin Middle School to find out the current distribution of teacher feedback and students’ attitudes as well as preferences toward teacher feedback though class observation,questionnaire plus interview.By means of the quantitative and qualitative analysis,the author gets the following results: Firstly,positive feedback is much higher than negative feedback in junior school English classroom.Among them,the highest rate of positive feedback issimple approval,and then the approval with repetition and the least positive feedback is approval with explanation.While the highest rate of negative feedback is restatement,the next is explicit correction,elicitation and clarification request respectively,and metalinguistic feedback in the lowest rate.Secondly,students generally agree that the teacher feedback has great influence on their own learning proficiency.Thirdly,students have different preferences toward different teacher feedback.When the students answer is right,they prefer to receive additional positive feedback rather than simple praise;when the students are unable to answer the questions,they want to get more guidance from the teachers;when the students make mistakes,they hope that teachers can use the indirect way to do the error correction as much as possible.In order to improve the quality of teacher feedback in junior high school English classes,some implications are proposed as following: Firstly,teachers should give appropriate feedback based on the different characters of students.Secondly,teachers should use a variety of teacher feedback strategies in the classroom.Thirdly,teachers should do more reflections after class to enhance their overall professional quality.