Abstract:

Classroom interaction has been a hot topic in recent decades. Most of the previous research, however, analyzed teacher feedback from a broad classification standard including positive or negative ones, direct or indirect ones, etc., and just offered suggestions to enhance one aspect of students’ second language proficiency such as writing. (Nakazawa, 2006; Purnawarman, 2011; Silver & Lee, 2007) This research aims to investigate how to improve teacher feedback based on a more detailed division and give more targeted strategies according to classroom records.

This study began by selecting six classroom records totaling about four minutes in different China university English classrooms. Then the records were transcribed and annotated with pause time, tone changes, gestures to research teacher feedback. The researcher proposed an annotation scheme for teacher feedback classification combining mood and form such as directive pursuing feedback. Moods include assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative which are proposed by Searle. Forms of feedback include evaluative feedback giving an opinion on or explain students’ answers, pursuing feedback making a detailed inquiry about students’ answers and corrective feedback correcting students’ errors in their answers. After that, the results were qualitatively analyzed and the discussion for analysis followed.

This research found that:
1) L1 (First Language) appropriate usage is good for students' second language acquisition;
2) Teachers with high Classroom Interactional Competence is easier to build harmonious interaction with students;
3) Peer feedback is very effective in assisting teacher feedback with students’ error correction;
4) Grice’s Cooperative Principles can instruct teachers to give better feedback;
5) Specific-general-specific feedback sandwich model is innovatively proposed in this research, which might save teachers’ time and satisfy students;
6) Teachers' questioning that lacks in skills will make students’ interaction difficult;
7) Recast can help students learn more second-language knowledge by adding new information.

The key contribution in this research is to provide some specific strategies for the improvement in teacher feedback to promote teacher-student interaction and reduce power imbalance between them. This not only has guiding significance for university second language classes, but also enlightens traditional teacher-centered teaching.

Keywords:

Teacher Feedback, Teacher-student Power Imbalance, Classroom Interaction, Speech Act Theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principles, Second Language Acquisition.