英语语言教学-开题报告.doc

论 文 题 目 A study on the different patterns of teacher feedback used in high school English classroom

一、立论依据
（选题的研究意义、国内外研究现状分析）
1.1 Significance of the research topic
With the development of language teaching and learning, teacher talk, as an essential part in language teaching, plays an important role in promoting students learning proficiency and leading to the improvement of learning outcome, and as a result has attracted more and more concern. In China, English learners have less opportunities to learn English in a natural language environment, and most of them learn English by way of classroom teaching. As a result, for students, teacher talk becomes an important source of language input.
Researches and studies showed that in an English classroom, teacher talk makes up 70% to 80% of the time (Nunan, 1991; Zhao, 1998). Nunan talked about the importance of teacher talk, “teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of the classroom, but also for the process of L2 acquisition. It is important for the organization and management of the classroom because it id through speech that teachers either succeed or fail to implement their teaching plans. In terms of acquisition, teacher talk is important because it is probably the major source of comprehensible target of language input the learner is likely to receive”. Chaudron’s research also indicated that teacher talk, on the whole accounted for 2/3 of the class time (1988). Although recently we have been advocating the idea of changing the traditional teacher-centered teaching mode to student-centered, the function of teacher talk still cannot be ignored. From the 1970s, second language teaching researchers have concerned more and more about discourse and classroom conversation. In the late 1980s, many scholars started to shift the focus of research to teacher talk in classroom, and found that even the same teaching method could lead to big difference on teaching effect, as the language teachers used in the classroom was different. As Hakansson (1986) put it in the Quantitative Studies of Teacher Talk, the quantity and quality of teacher talk in classroom play an important even decisive role in the teaching.
Teacher talk is mainly made up of four parts, which are teacher talk of classroom management, explaining, asking questions and teacher talk as feedback. With the researches on teacher talk continuously detailed and in-depth, teacher feedback, as an important part of teacher talk, has aroused much attention as well. Teacher feedback is not only a vital tool of teacher and students interaction, but also a significant factor related to student’s language input and output. While the effect and contribution of teacher talk and corrective feedback in classroom have been of great interest in the field of second language acquisition and pedagogy, less attention has been paid to the empirical study of teacher feedback in high school English classroom, most of the researches and studies are descriptive research on teacher feedback, especially on teacher feedback in college English classes. Therefore, it is of great importance to do research on the teacher feedback in the high school English classroom.
According to The Standard of English Curriculum (2003), Elementary English course should not only develop students ' language knowledge and language skills, but also have the responsibility and obligation to foster students ' positive attitudes. What is more, with the development of humanism theory, researchers have put their attention to the relationship between affect and learning. They stressed that learning is the involvement of the whole person, including the cognition and emotion. Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis (1982) also emphasized the role of learning affect in foreign language learning. The hypothesis suggests that the learners are distracted by affective factors, such as motivation, self-confidence and anxiety, in language learning process. Many researches have been done to evaluate the importance of learning affect in the learning process, but very few of them pay attention to its influence in the teaching process and combine it with teacher feedback. Teachers now start to aware the affective factors and use supportive feedback to maintain students’ self-esteem (Jiang, 2009). However, the feedbacks teachers frequently used in the English classroom are simple and mechanical, such as “good” or “very good” (Nunan, 1991). Although this kind of feedback may have positive influence on students’ English learning, its long-term impact cannot be ensured. After the investigation to 538 English teachers in Guangzhou, Zhou and He (2005) proves that in the teaching process, quite a number of teachers haven’t taken advantage of effective factors to improve the teaching efficiency, and although many teachers have the idea of optimizing teaching with emotion, few of them put it into practice. Therefore, teachers should pay more attention to their feedback to students as it can influence students’ learning affect.

1.2 Literature review
1.2.1 Teacher feedback
1.2.1.1 Definition of teacher feedback
With the beginning of the research on discourse and classroom conversation, teacher feedback has become one of the heated topics in discussion since 1970s. In second language acquisition, teacher feedback is regarded as a part of classroom interaction. Thus, Seliger (1983) defines teacher feedback as teacher’s response to learners, and in this process, learners can judge whether their understanding of the target language is correct or not and whether they have master the target language or not. Ellis (1984) also states that teacher feedback is a response to the attempt learners made in order to achieve communication, and that “feedback involves such functions as correction, acknowledgement, request, clarification and back channel cues.” Ur (1996) defines teacher feedback as the information teachers giving to improve students’ performance in the learning tasks. What is more, the psycholinguistic, Cook (2000), points out that teacher classroom feedback is the process teacher evaluating students behavior, while Brookerhart (1997) argues that feedback is the thing “that matches specific descriptions and suggestions with a particular students’ work”. In spite of the different definitions different researchers gave, they all have one thing in common that they all believe that teacher feedback is teacher’s response to the student, which is just based on Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) who come up with the structure of “ initiation-response-feedback (IRF)”. In a word, teacher feedback is actually the response that teacher giving to the students to help them understand things better and improve their learning efficiency.
1.2.1.2 Classification of teacher feedback
Just like the definitions of teacher feedback mentioned above, different researchers and scholars views different on the classification of teacher feedback from various angles.
According to its function, teacher feedback can be simply divided as positive feedback and negative feedback (Nunan, 1991; Zhao, 1998). Positive feedback means teachers give positive response to students’ behavior, for example “good”, “well done”, “nice try” and so on, while negative feedback is a teacher’s response to the students’ language output when there are errors, which is usually named as corrective feedback according to Lin and Zhou (2011). What is more, on the aspect of feedback target, Richard and Lokhart (1996) put forward form-focused feedback, the response given to the correctness of language form, and meaning-focused feedback, the response given to the correctness of the content of learners’ answers. Cullen (2002) deep analyzes this and classifies teacher feedback into evaluative feedback and discoursal feedback. The former focus on the evaluation on the form of language and the latter is on the contents of the answer. Most of the researches and studies on teacher feedback focuses on corrective feedback, and as a result corrective feedback has also been classified in many ways. For example, Long (1996) have come up with two concepts: explicit corrective feedback and implicit corrective feedback, and the former means to point out the mistakes of the English learner and give the correct answer directly, while the latter means to use implicit way of error correction , such as repetition, recast and clarification request and so on. Lightbown and Spada (2001) has the same view with Long, they think corrective feedback can be implicit (e.g., “Yes, he goes to school on foot everyday”) or explicit (e.g., “No, you should say goes, not go”). However, Lyster and Ranta (1997) identified six typical feedback moves teachers made after an observational study: explicit correction, recast, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, Elicitation and repetition. On the basis of previous researches and studies as well as classroom observation, Lin and Zhou (2011) find that there are 9 simple teacher feedback and 7 complex teacher feedback. The 9 simple feedback are positive feedbacks, explicit correction, elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, clarification request, recast, repetition, elaboration and comment, and the 7 complex feedback are as follows: positive feedback with recast, positive feedback with repetition, positive feedback with metal language, positive feedback with comment, repetition with metalinguistic feedback, repetition with elaboration and repetition with comment. This thesis will be based on the classification of Lin and Zhou.

1.2.1.3 Overseas and Domestic researches
Just as Makarenko, a Soviet educator, points out that the same teaching method can also lead to the difference of 20 times because of different language used in teaching and that teacher’s language training to a large extent determines students’ the mental efficiency. Teacher feedback as an important part of teaching can influence teaching efficiency. If the feedback is used to extend the student’s answer and is connected with the knowledge they have already owned, it can arouse students’ interests in learning much more easily and promote students actively participate in classroom interaction. In this process, teachers can not only give response to students’ answers, but also can expand students thinking and correcting their mistakes in understanding, and at the same time a good opportunity to provide students with more language input (Well, 1983).
Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis indicates that learners who is self-confident, full of motivation and at a low level of anxiety will achieve better in second language learning. Student’s learning effect is of great importance in language learning. What is more, for young learners, especially learners in and after adolescence, teacher plays an important role with regard to their self-image (Connell and Ilardi, 1987; Damon and Hart, 1982; Hamachek, 1992). In addition to this, teacher feedback as an important interaction tool in the classroom will have influences on student’s learning effect. Noels’ research in 1999 indicated that teacher feedback would influence students’ internal motivation. Moreover,“the amount and kind of positive or negative feedback that learners receive in class from both the teacher and their peers will affect their sense of achievement, their motivation to achieve more and the establishment of their self-efficacy in that area”, as Williams and Burden said. Pan (2006) did a research on teacher feedback in high school English class based on the classroom observation and the analysis of students’ dairies and found that teacher feedback could influence students’ learning effect (motivation, anxiety and self-confidence) in either a positive or a negative way. Li (2008) also proved that students’ learning effect was an important basis for teacher choosing how to give feedback.
Many researches show that teacher feedback have positive influence on student’s learning effect. Mo Lei (2002) found that through teacher feedback, students can see their own learning outcomes, which will encourage students. Besides, seeing their success and progress will boost their confidence and enhance their interest in learning. At the same time, knowing their own shortcomings and errors can inspire them to redouble their efforts to succeed. Slavin (2004) emphasized that teachers should frequently use praise, and when the praise is for a certain behavior and with credibility, it will be an effective way to encourage students. In addition, teacher’s supportive feedback can meet students’ demand of face wants and increase their confidence of speaking (Zhao, 2007).
However, teacher feedback can also lead to negative effect. Krashen pointed out in 1985 that corrective feedback may make students be defensive, and as a result, they may avoid using a more complex sentence structure and put their attention on the form of the language but the meaning, which is not good for language acquisition. What is more, Huang (2008) had the same idea that improper corrective feedback can undermine students’ self-confidence and learning enthusiasm.

1.2.2 Theoretical foundation
1.2.2.1 The input Hypothesis
The input hypothesis states that learners progress in their knowledge of the language when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level. If teachers provide enough comprehensible input, then the structures that acquires are ready to learn will be present in that input. According to Krashen (2003), this is a better method of developing grammatical accuracy than direct grammar teaching. Therefore, teacher feedback as a main part of teacher talk is a good way to provide students with comprehensible input.
1.2.2.2 The Affective Filter Hypothesis
On the basis of Dulay and Burt’s idea that “affective factor plays an important role in filtering the input” (1974), Krashen (1982) came up with the “Affective Filter Hypothesis” and pointed out that the “affective filter” could prevent language learners from completely absorb the comprehensible input.
Krashen believes that “motivation”, “self-confidence” and “anxiety” are the three emotional factor that affect language acquisition. Although affective factors vary from individual to individual, learners with high learning motivation, strong self-confidence and low anxiety will achieve better in language learning. On the contrary, those who have no learning motivation, lack confidence and with high anxiety will achieve less since the affective filter becomes stronger and prevent their language acquisition.
1.2.2.3 Feuerstein’s Theory of Mediation
Feuerstein suggests that from the very beginning a child’s learning is under the effect of “significant adults”, who are also regarded as “mediators” or “mediating adults”. T