A Survey On Teacher Verbal Feedback In Junior English Class

Teacher talk is the main form of classroom interaction between teachers and students as well as an important carrier of knowledge in English class.Teacher feedback is an important part of teacher talk.Teacher feedback refers to the verbal or non-verbal response of teachers to students' classroom behavior.Effective teacher feedback can not only arouse students' learning interest,create active classroom atmosphere,but also enable students to obtain more knowledge.On the contrary,if teacher feedback is used improperly,it may have a bad impact on students' learning.Studies on teacher feedback in China started relatively late and they are mainly targeted at college students.So it's very necessary to study teacher feedback in middle school including junior school.According to social constructivism,teaching procedure is in fact the interaction between teachers and students.Teachers should not ignore students' own experience.This study combine social constructivism with the theory of teacher feedback since teacher feedback should also stress the importance of students.The classification of teacher feedback in the research are raised by Annet(1969),Nunan(1991),Lyster& Ranta(1997).In this study,five English teachers and fifteen students from Licai experimental school in Jiangyan were selected as the research objects.Through classroom observation and interview,the following questions were attempted to be answered: 1.What are utilization features of different kinds of feedback in actual class? 2.What are junior English teachers' preferences and students' preferences towards teacher feedback? 3.What are teachers' purposes of using certain feedback and to what extent has these purposes been achieved?The study lasts two months.The author observed twenty English classes with the record sheet and recorded the implementation of different types of teacher feedback in actual class.Speaking lesson,reading lesson,listening lesson and writing lesson of each teacher are all contained.In order to know the students' attitude towards teacher feedback and teachers' purposes of using certain type of teacher feedback,the author conducted the one-to-one interviews with five observed teachers and fifteen observed students.Major findings of this study are as follows:(1)Different types of feedback have different frequencies of use in the actual classroom.Teachers tend to use positive feedback and explicit correction more frequently.Many factors will affect the use of teacher feedback.(2)The preferences of teachers and students towards different types of feedback are generally similar.But there are also some students who have different opinions with teachers.For example,manyteachers think that implicit correction are better for students,while some students hope that teachers can directly correct their mistakes.(3)Teachers have multiple purposes to implement certain kind of feedback.Not all the purposes can be well achieved based on students' point of view and classroom observation.