A Survey On Teacher Feedback In High School English Speaking Teaching

Teacher feedback plays a significant role in teachers' discourse and has thus become a widely researched topic for scholars at home and abroad.The importance of teacher feedback can be seen in the way that it is not only a great indicator reflecting students' class performance and language proficiency,but also an important access for students to get more language input.Foreign scholars started to take interest in the research of teacher feedback since the late 1960s,while it was not until the late 1980s that the research on this topic began in China.Given that most of the research in China was done based on junior middle school and university teaching,which means the research on high school was relatively rare,this paper chooses high school oral English teaching as the research object for teacher feedback research.This paper is mainly based on IRF mode and Long's interaction theory.The following questions are studied:1)What is the current status of teacher feedback in spoken English teaching in senior high schools?(Frequency and types of teacher feedback)2)What are the attitudes or preferences of teachers and students respectively for teacher feedback?3)What impacts do different types of feedback have on teacher-student interaction?In this case study on a high school in Haidian District,Beijing for 2 months,data and materials were collected through classroom observation,classroom recording,questionnaires for teachers and students and interviews with teachers and students and then statistically analyzed and further researched by SPSS 23.0 and Excel.The conclusions can be drawn as follows:1)With the in-depth study of teacher feedback at home and abroad,teachers and students have a deeper understanding of the importance of teacher feedback.Teachers use single feedback more frequently than complex feedback,and present the following characteristics:simple positive feedback,repetition,and evaluation are most frequently used among types of single feedback;simple positive feedback plus repetition,simple positive feedback plus evaluation are most frequently used among types of complex feedback;the students' favorite simple positive feedback plus expansion has not been fully used and valued;2)Teachers and students have different attitudes and preferences for teacher feedback due to their different status;3)Elicitation and clarification request are the two feedback methods that best trigger a continuous IRF mode and are most helpful in stimulating classroom interaction.According to the research results,following suggestions are proposed to enhance teacher feedback quality in spoken English teaching in high schools:1)Teachers ought to continuously improve the quality of teacher feedback and make flexible use of single and complex feedback;2)Teachers should try to focus more on comfort/encouragement plus elicitation feedback;3)Teachers should satisfy students' justifiable needs for teacher feedback as much as possible;4)Teachers should reflect on the use of feedback in their oral teaching;5)Teachers should use as much feedback as possible that can trigger continuous IRF mode.