A Study On College English Teacher Talk And The Effect Of Classroom Interaction

Currently, most of researchers home and abroad on teacher talk only focus on the features of it as language input, but there has been little attention paid to the role of teacher talk in classroom interaction in the field of foreign language teaching. In order to meet the requirement of the newly-revised College English Syllabus, teacher talk has to be reformed. Due to the above reasons, this study will analyze teacher talk of six ESP teachers comprehensively and systematically. Through the investigation and analysis of their classroom teacher talk and effect of classroom interaction, this study is aimed to help more teachers learn what kind of teacher talk is conducive to classroom interaction.This study takes naturalistic inquiry as research method, with the aim of investigating the real teaching process. The researcher wants to explore the influence of college English teacher talk on the effect of classroom interaction, choosing the classes of ESP (TOEFL-iBT & IELTS) Teaching in Shenyang Normal University ("TOEFL-iBT & IELTS Teaching in SYNU" is used in the following part for short) as the case to carry out this study. The researcher audio-recorded the observed classes of TOEFL-iBT & IELTS Teaching in SYNU, and took field notes during the process of classroom observation. Meanwhile, questionnaires (see Appendixâ… ) have been handed out to students with the aim of studying the influence of college English teacher talk on the effect of classroom interaction from different perspectives.Based on these research questions, first of all, the author observed classes of TOEFL-iBT & IELTS in SYNU several times; Then the author chose 200 students randomly from these classes to participate in the questionnaire survey; Finally, the author conducted semi-structured interview with six teachers of the observed classes to acquire more information about some specific issues. This study incorporates three types of research methods- observation, questionnaire, and interview.The study has found that:1) The percentage of teacher talk time in the total class time in the classes of the six chosen teachers of TOEFL-iBT & IELTS Teaching in SYNU is 62.22%, which provides the students with enough English input; furthermore, these teachers allocate some time to let students give their own output, which can improve classroom interaction.2) The teachers of TOEFL-iBT and IELTS Teaching in SYNU raise more referential questions than display questions, and referential questions are more conducive to classroom interaction.3) The teachers of TOEFL-iBT and IELTS Teaching in SYNU can give suitable feedback to students'answers: When students give right answers, most of the teachers give praise and then comments to students'good performance, and this is the best way of teacher praise profitable to classroom interaction; When students give wrong answers, most of the teachers provide students with part of the correct answer as assistance to elicit students to give the rest answer, and the best way of error treatment that does good to classroom interaction is to repeat students'errors to arouse students'attention, in order to encourage students to make self-repair till they give the right answers themselves.4) The teachers of TOEFL-iBT and IELTS Teaching in SYNU use clarification requests most often to solve communication problems in class, and clarification requests are the best way of interactional modification to elicit students'output, thus conducive to classroom interaction.At the end of this thesis, the author summarizes the whole study systematically, pointing out the limitations of the present study due to the limited objective situations, such as limited time. Moreover, the author offers some feasible suggestions for future research of the same kind.