A Comparative Study Of Novice And Expert English Teachers’ Classroom Feedback In Junior High Schools

Teacher feedback refers to the teacher’s response to learners’ efforts to communicate.It is an indispensable part of English classroom teaching.In the classroom,students can enrich their language knowledge and improve their language skills through appropriate and effective feedback from teachers.First,two novice English teachers and two expert English teachers from a junior high school are taken as the main research objects.Besides,this paper is based on Krashen’s comprehensible input,Swain’s output hypothesis and scaffolding theory.The main research methods are classroom observation,interview.At the same time,a questionnaire survey is adopted among students in classes led by four teachers.This paper tries to answer the following questions:(1)What are junior high school students’ attitudes and preferences towards teacher feedback?(2)What are the similarities and differences between junior high school novice and expert English teachers in their attitudes towards teacher feedback?(3)What are the similarities and differences between junior high school novice and expert English teachers in terms of the types of teacher feedback?Through data analysis,the major findings could be summarized as follows:(1)In terms of students’ attitudes and preferences towards teacher feedback,the results of the questionnaire showed that almost all the students liked teachers’ positive feedback.For positive feedback,they like praise and repetition the most,followed by extended praise,extended comment and simple praise.For negative feedback,they like clarification request the most,followed by elicitation,recast,repetition,explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback.(2)In terms of the four teachers’ attitudes of teachers’ feedback,both novice teachers and expert teachers agree that teacher feedback plays an important role in English classroom.And they believe that when they give feedback,they are based on the principle of bringing good influence to students and promoting their progress.At the same time,they also believe that their feedback should be more flexible and rich.(3)In terms of the frequency of teacher feedback types,it can be concluded as follows: First of all,in general,both novice teachers and expert teachers use positive feedback more frequently.Secondly,from the perspective of the type of positive feedback,the most frequent use of novice teachers is simple praise,followed by praise plus repetition,praise plus extended comments and praise plus expansion.The most frequent use of expert teachers is praise plus repetition,followed by simple praise,praise plus extended comments and praise plus expansion.It can be seen that novice teachers used simple praise the most times,while expert teachers used simple praise plus repetition the most times.Thirdly,in terms of the type of negative feedback,the use frequency of novice teachers is explicit correction,repetition,elicitation,meta-linguistic feedback,clarification request and recast.And the use frequency of expert teachers is elicitation,clarification requests,repetition,explicit correction,recast and meta-linguistic feedback.It can be seen that the most common used negative feedback method for novice teachers is explicit correction,while the most common used negative feedback method for expert teachers is elicitation.In addition,expert teachers used more elicitation and clarification requests than novice teachers.And novice teachers used more meta-linguistic feedback and repetition than expert teachers.Meanwhile,the most significant difference between novice teachers and expert teachers is the frequency of explicit correction.Novice teachers used explicit correction more than twice as often as expert teachers.