Investigation Of Teachers’ Oral Feedback Strategies In Excellent Junior High School English Reading Classes

As a key part of classroom interaction,teacher feedback plays an important role in junior high school English teaching.Effective teacher feedback stimulates students’enthusiasm for learning,promotes teacher-student interaction and develops students’reading abilities while invalid feedback wastes class time and reduces class efficiency.The previous researches on teacher feedback at home and abroad show that different feedback strategies are used in different types of lessons,few researches having subjected English reading classes to the observation,though.This thesis investigates ten reading classes in the 13th National Junior Middle School English High-quality Classes in 2019,studying the distribution characteristics of classroom feedback strategies of these award-winning teachers and the co-occurrence between feedback strategies and aspects of reading abilities.This investigation tries to figure out the following questions:1.What oral feedback strategies are employed by the excellent teachers of the demonstration English reading classes investigated?And how are they distributed throughout the class?2.In what patterns do the teacher’s feedback strategies co-occur with the aspects of the reading abilities focused on?Class video observation is the main method employed to answer the above questions.When observing the ten video classes,the researcher notes down all the feedback strategies employed by the teachers on the basis of the feedback strategy classification(Nunan,1991;Ferreira,Moore,&Mellish,2007;Lyster&Ranta,1997;He,2013).From this comes out the distribution characteristics of the feedback strategies.In addition,a structured interview is used to further explain the distributional characteristics of the data.Lastly,the researcher figures out the co-occurrence between feedback strategies and aspects of reading abilities by observing the reading ability training intention reflected by teachers’ feedback,so as to put forward suggestions on using oral feedback strategies in reading lessons.The reading ability in this study adapted from Wang&Chen(2016),mainly includes some sub-categories under three categories:language competence,reading comprehension,and cultural awareness.Data analysis shows that the teachers involved use altogether five positive and four negative feedback strategies.The positive ones include:simple praise,praise and elaboration,praise and comment,praise and rephrasing,affirmative repetition.And the four negative ones are:recast,non-affirmative repetition,clarification request,and elicitation.The positive feedback,accounting for 78.34%of all the feedback,far outnumbers the negative.Specifically,among the five positive feedback strategies,affirmative repetition(22.45%)ranks the first,followed by praise and elaboration(20.25%),simple praise(16.48%),praise and rephrasing(10.52%),praise and comment(8.63%).Among the four negative feedback strategies,elicitation(10.21%)comes the first,followed by clarification request(6.91%),recast(3.92%).Non-affirmative repetition(0.63%)is rarely used by excellent teachers.In terms of the different phases of the reading class,the while-reading phase witnesses the most feedback,followed by the pre-reading phase and finally the post-reading phase.During the pre-reading phase,affirmative repetition is the most frequently used by excellent teachers.During the while-reading phase,praise and elaboration is the most frequently used feedback,and during the post-reading phase,praise and comment is the most widely used feedback.Among the five positive feedback strategies,only praise and elaboration co-occurs with all the three categories of reading abilities:language competence,reading comprehension,and cultural awareness.Affirmative repetition and praise and rephrasing co-occur with language competence separately.Contrastively,simple praise,praise and comment have no co-occurrence with the reading abilities.All the four kinds of negative feedback strategies co-occur with language competence and reading comprehension.In comparison,elicitation has more co-occurrence with the sub-categories of these two reading abilities.Due to the restriction of conditions,this thesis still has its limitations such as the small number of subjects and the simple research methods.Nevertheless,based on the observed demonstrative feedback characteristics of classroom teaching,this investigation summarizes some implications for English teachers.Teachers should flexibly and purposefully use multiple feedback strategies and they should strengthen the application of positive feedback strategies in the three stages of reading,particularly the elaboration feedback.