A Survey On English Teacher Talk In Reading Class Of Junior High School From The Perspective Of Cognitive Metaphor

Teacher talk plays an extremely important role in teaching and teachers’ personal growth.On the one hand,teachers can convey knowledge and impart skills to students in the classroom through teacher talk;on the other hand,the language output by teachers can promote students’ understanding,absorption and use of the target language;at the same time,teacher talk is also the carrier of teachers’ thoughts and emotions,and the means to embody teaching concepts,teaching contents and teaching methods.However,from the current situation,many teachers’ teacher talk has many shortcomings,but teachers are not aware of the seriousness of this problem.At present,the study of teacher talk has become an important field of pedagogy and applied linguistics,but the study of teacher talk from the perspective of metaphor is relatively rare.In the process of teaching,teachers can improve language characteristics and consciously integrate metaphor into teacher talk as a feature,which can greatly improve the quality of language.On the basis of previous studies,this paper focus on metaphor to analyze teacher talk in junior high school English reading class.The selected videos(The Eleventh National Junior High School English Excellent Classroom Teaching)are sponsored by the National Association of Foreign Language Education and are made of the company of Shenzhen Kingsun Science.He will select 10 excellent teachers’ reading class video materials to transcribe and study these teachers’ metaphorical utterances.This study aims to solve the following two problems: firstly,what types of cognitive metaphor are involved in teacher talk? How different metaphor’s types are used in teacher talk;secondly,how metaphorical utterances are distributed in different procedures of reading class?The data is collected and analyzed based on the questionnaires and transcribed materials.It can be found that: Firstly,teacher talk includes four types of cognitive metaphor: structural metaphor,ontological metaphor,orientational metaphor and conduit metaphor.There are great differences in the frequency of using the four types of cognitive metaphors in English reading class.Generally speaking,structural metaphor is a more advanced form of metaphor and has a variety of manifestations.It is most frequently used in the four types of metaphor.Ontological metaphor is more commonly used because it is more general.However,orientational metaphor and conduit metaphor are rarely used because of their monotonous forms.Secondly,in While-reading step,teachers use the largest proportion of metaphorical utterances.The remaining four steps from high to low are Post-reading,Pre-reading,Summary and Homework.Meanwhile,the analysis found that: in a high-quality English reading class,the use of metaphor in teacher talk,especially the use of structural metaphor in teacher talk,is indispensable.And in different teaching procedures,teachers consciously use metaphors to construct discourse can not only express the rich meaning of knowledge in multiple ways,but also promote students’ understanding and use of the target language,so as to make the dull classroom full of vitality,thus promoting the teaching and learning of English classroom.However,the inadequacy of this paper is also obvious: the research subject is single;the explanation of“metaphor” in students’ questionnaire is not rigorous.In the future investigation and research,these problems should be analyzed more deeply.