A Study Of Regulative Teacher Talk In College English Class From The Perspective Of Positioning Theory

Teacher talk(TT)plays a significant role in classroom instruction,making a key impact on students’ learning.Thus,researchers at home and abroad have made numerous studies on it,expecting to gain some enlightenment to facilitate students’ effective learning in classes.From a literature review on the talk,it is found that most of the studies focused on the analysis of instructional discourse,including researches on amounts of teacher talk,speech rate,teacher’s questioning,IRF(initiative-response-feedback)interactive model and so on.Few studies have been conducted to analyze regulative discourse.Therefore,this thesis introduces positioning theory,and constructs a recursive model of regulative discourse on the basis of Bernstein’s pedagogic discourse theory.It analyzes the characteristics of novice and proficient college English teachers’ regulative talk,and discusses the mechanism of producing regulative discourse,expecting to provide some suggestions to the use of the talk.In the field of linguistics,positioning theory means that before the formation of discourse,people have positionings on themselves and others to make their discourse appropriate for certain situations.This thesis makes a comparative analysis on the characteristics of novice and proficient teachers’ regulative discourse in new lesson and exercise lesson from the perspective of two orders of positioning.Therefore,this thesis conducts classroom observation and recording on eight college English teachers,four novice teachers and four proficient teachers,and then classifies the recorded materials from two aspects,first-and second-order positioning,informational,procedural and disciplinary talk,for analysis.Then the following conclusions are made.Firstly,from the perspective of first-order positioning,in new and exercise lessons,proficient teachers use more regulative discourses and informational talks,and less disciplinary talks than novice teachers.The informational talks are more often in indirect form,while disciplinary talks are all in direct.As for procedural talk,in new lessons,proficient teachers use more of them than novice teachers,and most of the talks are in direct,while in exercise lessons,the two kinds of teachers produce nearly equal number of them,and the numbers of direct and indirect forms of the talks are almost equal.In addition,different teachers produce specific sentence structures in different talks.Secondly,from the perspective of second-order positioning,in new and exercise lessons,proficient teachers produce more informational talks than novice teachers,and there is no disciplinary talks produced by neither of the teachers.But as for procedural talk,in new lessons,proficient teachers use more of them than novice teachers,while in exercise lessons,the case is in the contrary.What’s more,novice and proficient teachers adopt different adaptive strategies in the use of regulative talk when second-order positioning happens.