A Study Of Senior High School English Teachers’ Feedback From The Speech Act Theory Perspective

Classroom feedback is an important part of a teacher’s classroom discourse and refers to the evaluative and corrective feedback language given by the teacher to students’ verbal performance.The successful use of English teachers’ classroom feedback plays a significant role in contributing to the success of classroom teaching.It is not only part of students’ language input,but also promotes students’ language output and thus language acquisition.Timely,accurate and appropriate feedback not only enables students to understand and identify problems and errors in their learning process,and to correct and rectify them in time,so that they can grasp the right learning direction;it also gives students psychological satisfaction and helps to increase their motivation and confidence in learning English.This study focuses on two questions:（1）What is the current situation of the application of senior high school English teachers’ feedback in the classroom?（2）What are the differences on the speech act generated by types of teachers’ feedback? This paper uses a combination of questionnaires,classroom observations and corpus analysis to investigate the overall situation of senior high school English teachers’ classroom feedback.Based on a text corpus of fifteen real classroom transcriptions,an attempt is made to statically describe and dynamically analyse the use and distribution characteristics of teachers’ feedback in senior high school English classrooms and their actual speech acts from the perspective of speech act theory,with the aim of grasping the speech acts achieved by different types of feedback from a macro perspective.The results of the study shows that: firstly,regarding the current status of English teachers’ feedback in senior high school,English teachers use content feedback most frequently,followed by theme and form feedback;all of these,praise,supplement,recast,and meaning negotiation are the most commonly used types of feedback.Of all the feedback types,the most commonly used is meaning negotiation feedback,and the least commonly used is simple negation feedback.Secondly about the effect of different feedback on speech acts,different types of feedback produce different perlocutionary acts on students’ learning,cognition,psychology and even emotions.The vast majority of teachers’ feedback carries with it different aspects of positive affect.For example,the positive effects of affirmation and praise feedback are direct.The positive impact of supplement,explanation and summary feedback are indirect.Recast,form negotiation and repetition feedback all improve students’ linguistic accuracy,while recast and form negotiation feedback also increase students’ linguistic input.However,teachers prefer recast feedback,while students prefer form negotiation.Thematic comments and additions,questioning and meaning negotiation feedback all drive significant language output in the classroom and allow for genuine teacher-student interaction.However,there is a small amount of teachers’ feedback that can have a negative impact on students.Simple negation feedback,for example,directly rejects students’ answers.Explicit correction feedback can also be psychologically stressful for some students.However,the study also found that there were some areas for improvement in teachers’ use of feedback,so the paper concludes with a few suggestions to raise teachers’ awareness and attention to feedback,to improve feedback skills and efficiency.The aim is to maximize the motivating and regulating effects of teachers’ feedback and to achieve an overall improvement in the standard and quality of English teaching in senior high schools.