9 Intonation and feedback in the
EFL classroom
Martin Hewings
We still have very little idea of what goes on in a [language-teaching] classroom
in terms of interaction.
(Cook 1982)INTRODUCTION
The research described below is an attempt to come to a better understanding
of what does go on by applying the system of ascribing communicative
significance to intonation outlined in Brazil, Coulthard and Johns (1980)
and Brazil (1985) to a corpus of recorded data. A very limited aspect of
interaction is considered: the provision of feedback by a teacher following
and relating to a student’s response in language pattern drills in the EFL
classroom.
In the teaching exchange (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975), consisting of
initiation—response—feedback, most interest in pedagogical research has
focused on the first two parts. Considerable work has been done, for example,
on the type of initiation that makes a response more or less ‘meaningful’ or
‘communicative’. Rather less attention has been given to the form of feedback
given by the teacher and a consideration of its possible influence on language
learning. This, perhaps, is surprising in view of the fact that in each such
three-part interchange, feedback may well constitute one-third of the total
language produced. A recognition of this imbalance was the primary motivation
for the research reported here, a more extensive description of which can be
found in Hewings (1985).
FEEDBACK
The notion of feedback derives from analysis of the manipulation of systems
in which part of the output from the system is returned to it as input,
modifying its characteristics and, consequently, its subsequent output. An
analogy can be drawn between this procedure and a common event in the
second language (L2) classroom. A student is provided with a stimulus to
produce a sample of the L2. His/her performance is then matched against