Teacher's Discoursal Strategies in Providing Positive Feedback to Student Responses: A Study of Four English Immersion Teachers in People's Republic of China

This paper investigates the discoursal strategies of four teachers in providing feedback to student responses in English classrooms in Xi’an, People’s Republic of China. The findings indicate that the teachers provide positive feedback for students English learning in various ways, including using the most common strategies such as accepting, encouraging, and repeating, as well as the strategies of extending and prompting. This study indicates that these strategies are beneficial to the students’ linguistic and cognitive development because they provide comprehensible input and require English-speaking on the part of students. Although some of the strategies appear to be common among teachers in English-speaking educational systems, they are identified explicitly in this study because they are strategies different from those used in traditional language classrooms in China. In addition, this study differs from the previous work done in that it posits the analysis of discourses in extended exchanges within one thematic topic. These exchanges usually consist of more than one round of initiation – response – followup (IRF) sequence. Such broadened IRF sequences provide a rich and meaningful situated context from which the education on the function of classroom discourse can be made.