Case Study On The Application Of Metalanguage In Classroom By High School English Teacher

Metalanguage is a language or symbol system used to analyze and describe teachers’ teaching language,and is a tool language.It plays a very important role in foreign language classroom teaching.Metalanguage,as an important component of teacher discourse,has attracted the attention of many researchers.This study takes two excellent senior English teachers and 260 senior high school students from a middle school in Chongqing as the research objects.According to the different English teaching contents selected by the teachers,this study investigated the use of metalanguage in senior high school English classes from the aspects of expression,use skills,interaction patterns,problem types and teaching organization and management.Firstly,this study has collected 640 minutes of classroom recordings from two teachers,each tacker 8 class hours and about 320 minutes of classroom recordings.According to the classroom recordings,the following aspects are analyzed:(1)the manifestation of metalanguage;(2)the trend of the use of meta-language in different teaching contents(vocabulary,grammar,text,pronunciation);(3)the interactive mode of metalanguage;(4)the metalanguage of classroom organization and management.Secondly,from the perspective of students,the author investigates students’ attitudes towards teachers’ meta-language use.Through the above analysis,we attempt to find out the rules of the use of meta-language in senior high school English teaching.The analysis shows that teachers use different metalanguages according to different teaching contents.Teachers in vocabulary and grammar classes will use more Chinese meta-language,while the explanation of phonetic knowledge sees more of the combination of English and Chinese,and the teaching of reading texts will find more English meta-language;the classroom interaction mode of metalanguage is mainly IRF;Chinese meta-language is rarely used in teaching organization and management;students also have different attitudes towards teachers’ use of meta-language.In terms of vocabulary explanation,nearly 40% of students prefer teachers to use English-Chinese combination to explain vocabulary,43% of students prefer teachers to use Chinese to explain pronunciation and grammar,42% of students prefer teachers to use meta-language skills for example,and 35% of students are uncertain about the use of meta-language in teaching organization and management.Most students prefer teachers to ask demonstrative questions rather than reference ones.Through the analysis of the data,we can draw the following conclusions:excellent senior English teachers’ use of classroom meta-language is of exemplary valuer,and teachers will choose appropriate meta-language skills for different teaching contents;teachers will also adjust their teaching meta-language expression based on the cognitive levels of students.In addition,the teachers studied have strong metalanguage awareness,and consciously cultivate students’ metalanguage awareness in the classroom.In view of the above research results,the author mainly puts forward relevant proposals on classroom metalanguage teaching from the three aspects--students,teachers and schools--to improve the quality of metalanguage use in senior high school English teaching,so as to further promote senior high school English teaching,and cultivate students’ metalanguage awareness.