| Classroom discourse,an integral part of classroom teaching,is the discourse used by teachers in the classroom.In the actual teaching environment,how teachers use language to strengthen their connection with students,motivate them and enliven the classroom atmosphere has become an issue worthy of study.So far,a great deal of research has been done on classroom discourse.However,most of the research focuses on classroom discourse itself,such as the interactivity of classroom discourse,the feedback of teachers,and so on.There are few comparative analyses of classroom discourse from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.Appraisal Theory is a new development of interpersonal meaning within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics.Attitude,engagement and graduation are the three systems within.Of these,the attitude system consists of affect,judgment and appreciation.Based on Appraisal Theory,the study aims to explore the distributions of attitude resources in the classroom discourse of junior high school English expert teacher and novice teacher and to figure out the similarities and differences of the attitude resources between them.An expert teacher and a novice teacher in Year 8 are selected as participants in this study in a junior high school in Hefei.20 reading lessons of both teachers are selected for classroom observation and recording.200 minutes of classroom recording of the expert teacher and 200 minutes of classroom recording of each of the novice teacher’s early and late stages of teaching are randomly selected for transcription as the corpus.This study explores the following questions:(1)What are the characteristics of the distribution of attitude resources in each of the classroom discourses of expert and novice teachers in junior high school? What are the similarities and differences in the distribution of attitude resources between them?(2)How does the distribution of attitude resources in classroom discourse change between the early and late stages of teaching for the novice teacher,and is there a tendency to approach the characteristics of the distribution of attitude resources of the expert teacher?The study demonstrates that there are some similarities and differences between the expert teacher’s classroom discourse and the novice teacher’s classroom discourse in attitude resources.Both the expert teacher and the novice teacher adopt Attitude resources in classroom discourse and positive attitudes outweigh negative attitudes.Numerically,the expert teacher’s attitude resources are richer than the novice teacher’s attitude resources.Expert teacher has the highest proportion of appreciation resources,followed by judgment resources and the lowest proportion of affect resources among their attitude resources.In the early stages of novice teachers’ teaching,the highest proportion of appreciative resources,the second highest proportion of affect resources and the lowest proportion of judgment resources are found.In the later stages of teaching,the novice teacher’s discourse tends to move closer to that of the expert teacher,as evidenced by much greater use of attitudinal resources,with appreciation resources appearing most frequently,judgment resources appearing second most frequently,and affect resources appearing least frequently.Attitude resources in teachers’ classroom discourse contribute to the realization of interpersonal meaning between teachers and students.The study not only broadens the application of Appraisal Theory in foreign language teaching and proposes a new perspective for the study of classroom discourse,but also helps novice teachers of junior high school English to learn from expert teachers and promote teaching ability.At the same time,the study provides more thoughts on how junior high school English teachers can use the attitude resources in classroom discourse to communicate better with students,thus promoting interpersonal relationships between teachers and students and creating a good classroom atmosphere. |
PDF Full Text Request