An Investigation into The Teachers’ Feedback to Students’ Answers in Lectures from TOEFL iBT

Abstract

 For those Vietnamese lecturers whose feedbacks are restricted to a limited number of expressions, using appropriate feedbacks can be challenging. This may also reduce students’ cooperative efforts in developing the interactive lectures. This paper aimed to examine the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of teachers’ feedback in lectures in English and the students’ expectation of these feedbacks. The descriptive study was based on a theoretical framework of Functional grammar, theory of speech act, epistemic modality and politeness. The data collection was conducted with 400 instances of teachers’ feedback quoted from transcripts of lecture extracts of TOEFL iBT and a questionnaire for 120 students at Tay Nguyen University, Vietnam. The former was to discover features of teachers’ feedback in terms of syntax, epistemic modality and politeness principles. The latter was designed for the analysis of students’ perception of teachers’ feedback. The study reveals, in view of clause as exchange, clause as message, and speech act theory, that most of the teachers’ feedback occurred in forms of truncated declarative sentence as a Theme or Rheme with discourse functions as confirming the validity of the students’ answers, encouraging, complimenting the students, correcting and modifying their answers. The study also found that most students expected teachers’ instructive and encouraging feedback with the correction rather than just a compliment. Based on the research findings, some implications for teachers’ feedback in teaching and learning in English are suggested.