An Analysis Of Discourse By English Teachers In Senior Middle Schools

Discourse analysis has aroused great interests among language teachers and linguists. As an object of discourse analysis, English classroom discourse has also become a focus among the linguists and educators. In recent years, the scholars in China have carried out a lot of empirical studies on English classroom, most of which focus on the college teaching and learning. However, little study has been conducted on primary and middle school. What's more, these studies are not systematic.This thesis is going to analysis English discourse in traditional way, including the amount of the teacher talk, the complexity of the talk, the number of teacher'questions, the types of teacher talk, the teachers'feedback and the interaction in English classroom. In addition, this thesis analyses the discourse markers of teacher talk, which is different from the previous researches. The present thesis mainly finds that:1) the proportion of the teacher talk is much more than that of the students. However, the proportion of student talk in the total number of the talk has been added a lot, which is different from previous study; 2) the number of various type sentences are well distributed. The using of interrogative increase remarkably which means the interaction between teacher and students become more; 3) the total number of the student talk tends to increase and a few students voluntarily ask the teacher questions. On one hand it can be inferred that the students participate in the class passively, on the other hand it indicates that the teacher talk has played an effective way in guiding the students to take part in class interaction; 4) the simple sentence is used more in teacher talk and the teacher talk in the class is oral-like sentence; 5) various discourse markers are used in teacher discourse. The large number of discourse markers using in teacher talk can attract the students'attention. Thus it promotes the students'participating in the classroom interaction and efficiency of language output.Based on the discourse analysis, this thesis gives some suggestions to English teaching and learning in senior middle school:a) The teacher can improve the quality of teaching by adjusting the number of the teacher talk; b) The teacher can enhance effective input through adding different type of sentences which benefit for students mastering the second language; c) Discourse markers should be properly added in the second language learning to stimulate students'activity in classroom interaction; d) The proportion of teacher talk should be adjusted to provide more opportunities for the students'effective output and participation in classroom interaction.