A Comparative Study On Expert And Novice Teachers' Feedback In English Classrooms Of Senior High School

As a major part of teacher talk,teacher feedback is not only an important tool for classroom teaching but also one of the crucial factors in language input and output.Thus,teacher feedback is significant to teaching outcome and language acquisition.In2017,National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School emphasizes that students should play the main role in class and teachers should cultivate students' language competence,which requires English teachers to get rid of the traditional dominant role in classroom,to increase classroom interactions with students,and to improve the quality of language input.Based on Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis,Swain's Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Long's Interaction Hypothesis,four English teachers from Henan Yong Cheng No.1 Senior High School are interviewed,and questionnaires for254 students from the first grade in this school are conducted afterwards.The data have been collected via questionnaires,interview,and classroom observation,and they have been transcribed and analyzed to find out the similarities and differences in classroom feedback between expert teachers and novice teachers.With the purpose of providing relevant instructive suggestions to improve the quality of English classroom teaching in senior high schools,this study is intended to explore the following issues:(1)What are the similarities and differences between expert and novice English teachers' feedback in language quality,in terms of the linguistic forms and appropriateness?(2)What are the similarities and differences between expert and novice English teachers' feedback with regard to the types and their distribution?(3)What is the attitude of expert and novice teachers respectively towards teacher feedback and its impact on language teaching?The research results show that: Firstly,for the linguistic form,feedback by expertteachers is characterized by wording diversity and semantic comprehensibility,while novice teachers' feedback presents the singularity in language form and polarization in language difficulty;in the teaching process,expert teachers offer decent feedback to guide students to engage in classroom interaction in accordance with teaching contexts and students' performance,yet novice teachers pay more attention to teaching contents and have not provided sufficient or effective feedback.Both types of teachers can give timely feedback after interactions,and they are likely to employ short sentences as feedback.Secondly,in terms of teacher feedback type,expert teachers' feedback involves both single teacher feedback and mixed teacher feedback,while novice teachers' feedback is dominated by single teacher feedback,with little mixed teacher feedback.Both types of teachers share the similarities in the use frequency of elicitation from single feedback and repetition with extension from mixed feedback.Thirdly,as for the attitude to teacher feedback,expert teachers hold a deeper perception of classroom feedback professionally and practically.They stress the combination of teacher feedback with classroom teaching and language acquisition,while novice teachers mostly provide feedback in a passive and mechanical way,lacking a correct and comprehensive understanding of teacher feedback.The common point lies in the recognition of the encouraging effect of teacher feedback.Therefore,it can be concluded that both novice teachers and expert teachers should flexibly adopt various teacher feedback in line with practical teaching,enrich classroom feedback strategies,and improve teacher feedback quality so as to reinforce the positive effects on classroom teaching and English learning in senior high school.