A Study Of The Effect Of Teacher’s Oral Feedback To Students’ Willingness To Communicate In Junior High School English Class

Teacher feedback has always been a hot spot in second language acquisition and foreign language teaching.Currently,studies on it mainly focus on the effect of teacher feedback on learners’ English writing and grammar,while the effect of teacher feedback on learners’ willingness to communicate has been ignored.English classes should be filled with communicative language activities.Increasing students’ oral output and improving their willingness to communicate are important purposes of language teaching.However,current studies on learners’ willingness to communicate focus on learners’ internal factors.But teacher feedback which has a greater impact on students’willingness to communicate is easily ignored.Therefore,based on the previous studies,the thesis selects four feedback methods as the research objects,they are simple positive feedback,positive feedback with adjuncts,recast,and explicit correction.The purpose of the thesis explores the effect of these four feedback methods on the willingness of junior high school students to communicate.Finally,some suggestions are put forward based on the experimental results to maximize the role of teacher feedback and facilitate the learners’ willingness to communicate.In this experiment,112 first-grade students are treated as the research subjects.And students English proficiency are divided into three levels according to their English scores on the entrance test Learners’ English proficiency level also serves as a factor affecting their willingness to communicate.A questionnaire,an interview,a willingness to communicate scale,and classroom observation as research instruments are used in the experiment This thesis presents two research questions:Which of the four feedback methods is the most effective way to improve students’ WTC?How does the teacher’s oral feedback affect learners’ willingness to communicate?The experiment lasts for two months.This experiment is conducted in a middle school in Shanxi Province,and four feedback methods are implemented within each of the two first-year classes respectively.The willingness to communicate scale is used for pre-test before the experiment begins,and the scale is used again at the end of each of the two phases of the experiment.Then the experiment is supplemented by the questionnaire,interview and classroom observation.Finally,the data are collected and analyzed through SPSS 24.0.The following conclusions are put forward:Firstly,positive feedback with adjuncts is the most effective way to improve learners’ willingness to communicate.But learners of different English proficiency levels have different preferences for different types of teacher feedback.For high-level learners,recast feedback is more likely to correct their language errors and meet their needs for more language knowledge.But middle-and low-level learners require more encouraging and positive feedback from their teachers.Secondly,based on the content of the interviews,the teacher’s positive feedback can improve low-level learners’communicative confidence,learning motivation,and interest in learning,but reduce students’ communicative anxiety.Learners’ English level is also an important factor in affecting their willingness to communicate.Learners with different English proficiency levels have different preferences for teacher feedback methods,so they have different willingness to communicate.Based on the above research conclusions,some teaching suggestions are put forward:Teachers should use positive feedback as much as possible in the classroom to improve learners’ communicative confidence.However,the teacher should also understand the learners’ English levels,and then adjust the feedback methods according to learners’ own situation.They should use negative feedback appropriately for the high-level learners to help them master English knowledge,and use more simple positive feedback for the low-level learners to improve their learning confidence.