A STUDY OF APPRECIATION RESOURCES IN TEACHER FEEDBACK IN THE CHINESE COLLEGE EFL CONTEXT
As a subsystem of the appraisal theory, attitude is concerned with emotional reactions, judgments of behaviors and evaluation of things. Most Chinese research on attitude takes literature works, advertisement, news reports and public speeches as subjects. Only a few studies concentrate on teacher talk, and fewer are concerned with teacher feedback. In terms of functional grammar, feedback is in relation to appraising student's performance; therefore it is reasonable to suppose that there exist appraisal resources in teacher feedback, especially attitude resources relying on classroom context to express teacher's evaluation on students and learning. Since appreciation, among three subcategories of attitude, is proved to be used most frequently in teacher talk, this study especially focuses on how appreciation resources in teacher feedback used in classroom context help complete meaning negotiation between the teacher and students. To achieve this, videos and transcripts of 10 advanced reading classes for English majors in a Chinese university are selected as the material. Flanders Interaction Analysis System and classroom discourse analysis are used as quantitative and qualitative methods respectively to analyze the impact of feedback with appreciation in IRF. Results indicate that appreciation resources play a role in pushing student's output and maintaining effective classroom interaction.