Research on Characteristics of Teachers’ Feedback Discourse in High-Quality English Classes in Junior High Schools: Evidence from Thirty-Two Teachers’ Classroom Observation

Abstract

Feedback Discourse is teachers’ response to students’ learning performance, which plays an extremely important part in teachers’ discourse, especially in language teaching classes. Taking the teaching videos of thirty-two English teachers in middle school exemplary lessons competition as the subjects, this study is intended to explore the characteristics of feedback discourse of junior high school English teachers from the proportion of teachers’ feedback discourse, the types of teachers’ feedback discourse, as well as the discourse structure of teachers’ feedback discourse.The results are as follows: (1) Teachers of high-quality classes observed pay attention to the importance of classroom feedback, and the proportion of teachers’ feedback discourse in high-quality classes accounted for 21% teachers’ classroom discourse. What’s more, the proportion of teachers’ feedback discourse in different types of classes is relatively consistent. (2) As for the feedback discourse used by teachers in high-quality classes observed, the positive feedback discourse is more frequently used than the negative feedback discourse. The positive feedback most commonly used is “Request for Clarification” and the negative feedback is“Explicit Correction”. (3)The teachers in high-quality classes used more separate discourse structure than continuous discourse structure which is suggested to use more. It is hoped that this study could provide some reference for the future study on junior high school English teachers’ feedback discourse.