A Study Of Teacher Feedback In English Class Of Junior High School

As an important part of teacher discourse,teacher feedback not only can reflect the situation of students' answers and the mastery of target language,but is regarded as the significant source of language input.In addition,effective teacher feedback can promote the interaction between the teacher and students and facilitate students' language output.Foreign scholars began to study teacher feedback since 1970 s.And domestic research related to teacher feedback started late,and few of them focus on junior high school English classes.Therefore,the author attempts to study teacher feedback in junior high school English classes.The author adopts Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Long's Interaction Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis as the theoretical foundations.The study was conducted in a junior high school in Hebei province by means of classroom observation and interview.And this study is intended to find out the major kinds of teacher feedback that are used in classes and students' preference and attitudes towards teacher feedback in order to get the enlightenment of improving the quality of teacher feedback.Based on the study and analysis,this thesis mainly has the following findings: teachers in this study mainly employed two major types of teacher feedback,that is single teacher feedback and complex teacher feedback.Among single feedback,the teachers mainly adopted positive feedback,repetition,explicit correction,and etc.And as for complex teacher feedback,they mainly used positive feedback plus repetition,positive feedback plus comment,and etc.The overall usage of feedback was high.However,the usage of single feedback was more than complex feedback.And it's found that not every feedback was effective through the interview for students.When students answered correctly,they expected to be given positive feedback plus comment,elaboration or other feedback;when they couldn't answer,they wanted to be given encouragement and guidance;when they gave wrong answers,they hoped that teachers could correct errors implicitly.In view of the findings,the author has some suggestions for English teachers.Firstly,teachers should improve the quality of feedback and use different feedback flexibly.Secondly,they should increase the frequency of the use of complex feedback and pay attention to the effective combination of different feedback.Thirdly,teachers should know students' situations like cognitive and psychological development and give proper feedback.Lastly,they should reflect on the effectiveness of feedback they give in classes by using action research method.