A Comparative Study Of Oral Feedback Between The Expert And Novice Teachers In Senior High School

Teacher's feedback on learners' performance is a significant part of teachers' talk.Particularly in English reading class,teacher's feedback serves as a bridge for classroom interaction.However,the domestic comparative study on teachers' feedback in senior high school English reading class is so insufficient that many senior high school teachers still lack the necessary understanding of teacher's feedback,let alone the effective use in different class types.Based on interaction hypothesis and classroom discourse theory,the current study investigated the similarities and differences between expert and novice teachers' oral feedback in senior high school English reading class in Nanchang city,Jiangxi province.Through the classroom observation of six teachers(12 classes in total),the author tries to provide answers to the following three questions: What are the similarities and differences on the quantity of feedback between expert and novice English teachers in senior high school? What are the similarities and differences on the frequency distribution of feedback types between expert and novice English teachers in senior high school? What are the similarities and differences on the use of feedback strategies between expert and novice English teachers in senior high school?Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data collected,the results of independent t-tests and Chi-Square tests indicated,first,that the feedback quantity of expert teachers is significantly more than that of novice teachers.Second,both expert teachers and novice teachers tend to use content feedback more often,followed by theme feedback and form feedback.Third,for content feedback,both expert teachers and novice teachers prefer positive feedback to negative feedback;for form feedback,expert teachers prefer negotiation of form,while novice teachers favor explicit correction;as for theme feedback,both expert teachers and novice teachers tend to most frequently use negotiation of meaning,but with different proportion.Based on the above findings,following suggestions are made: firstly,teachers should continuously learn relevant theoretical knowledge to promote the quality and quantity of classroom oral feedback;secondly,it is advisable for teachers to flexibly use different types of feedback,based on class types and students' current learning situations;furthermore,when giving feedback on students' performance,it issuggested to use less direct error correction but more meaning-or form-focused negotiation to improve students' participation in classroom teaching practice.