An Investigation On The Status Quo Of Teacher Feedback In Junior High School English Teaching

Teachers’ feedback is an indispensable link in English teaching and an important part of junior high school English classes.Effective teachers’ feedback can promote class teaching.In recent years,domestic scholars（Liu Xudong,Lin Zhengjun,Xie Xiaoyan,etc.）have realized that teachers’ feedback is of great significance to class teaching.However,most studies focus on college English classes and senior high school English classes,and there are few studies on the current situation of teachers’ feedback in junior high school English classes.Since teachers’ feedback in junior high school English classes is a very important part of students’ English learning process,the author hopes to find out the problems of using teachers’ feedback in junior high school English classes through the investigation.Five English teachers and 239 students in the eighth grade of a junior high school in C city,J province are the subjects of this research investigation.The main research questions of this study are as follows:（1）What is the status quo of using teachers’ feedback in junior high school English classes?（2）What are teachers’ attitudes toward the status quo of the use of teachers’ feedback in junior high school English classes?（3）What are students’ attitudes toward the status quo of the use of teachers’ feedback in junior high school English classes ?This study is conducted on the basis of Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis,Swain’s comprehensible output hypothesis,and Long’s interaction hypothesis.During the study,the author observes 20 classes（900 minutes in total）of five teachers by classes observation method to explore the amount and types of teachers’ feedback in English classes.Questionnaires and interviews among five teachers and their students（a total of 239 students）are used to investigate teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward the status quo of the use of teachers’ feedback to understand the impact that feedback has.The result of the study shows as follows.Firstly,the number of single-type feedback phrases used by teachers in classes is much greater than the number of mixed-type feedback phrases.Single-type feedback phrases include not only positive feedback phrases,explicit error correction,elicitation,meta-linguistic feedback,request for clarification,repetition,restatement,extension,and evaluation,but also direct teacher utterance of answers.Mixed-type feedback phrases include positive feedback phrases plus reiteration,positive feedback phrases plus repetition,positive feedback phrases plus meta-linguistic feedback,positive feedback phrases plus evaluation,repetition plus meta-linguistic feedback,repetition plus evaluation,and repetition plus extension.Secondly,teachers prefer mixed-type teachers’ feedback in classes,believing that mixed-type teachers’ feedback facilitates English language teaching and learning,as well as stimulating students’ interests and motivation in learning.However,in actual teaching,due to the limited time available in the classes,teachers tend to use single-type teachers’ feedback to save time for students.Thirdly,Students have supportive attitudes toward the teachers’ feedback,believing that the mixed-type teachers’ feedback are more beneficial to their own learning and can improve their self-confidence.In response to the current problems of teachers’ feedback in teaching,the author gives the following suggestions: teachers should strengthen the learning of the types and functions of teachers’ feedback and adopt different feedback phrases for different lesson types and different students to achieve the best teaching effect.Meanwhile,in the teaching process,teachers can pay attention to the development of students’ emotional factors and adopt appropriate feedback language according to different students’ needs.