Not Just Listening to the Teacher's Voice: A Case Study of a University English Teacher's Use of Audio Feedback on Social Media in China

• Main Author: Yueting Xu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-08-01
• Series: Frontiers in Education
• Subjects: audio feedback; higher education; case study; social media; university English teacher; China
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/feduc.2018.00065/full

A teacher's feedback is one of the most important aspects of student learning. Although feedback can arguably shift students from their current level toward their desired goals, students in higher education rate it as one of the least satisfactory areas partly because of the unidirectional nature of written feedback. This paper contains a case study of a university English teacher's use of audio feedback on a popular social media platform in China. This study includes an analysis of the teacher's audio feedback and follow-up interactions with the students on the popular WeChat application, teacher interviews, student reflective journals, and 10 classroom observations of student presentations. The study found that many features of the teacher's audio feedback contributed to student learning. The findings also reveal how the instructor's audio feedback on social media created opportunities for dialogic feedback by increasing student engagement with the comments and enhancing meaning negotiation, as well as how the teacher and students perceive the use of audio feedback. These findings are discussed in terms of creating dialogical feedback contexts for student learning, incorporating the use of audio feedback into teacher assessment literacy, and utilizing social media as an innovative platform for audio feedback. It concludes with implications for feedback practice in higher education and teacher assessment education.