A Study Of Teacher Talk In Visual, Audio And Oral English Classes Of Vocational And Technical College

A Study of Teacher Talk in Visual, Audio and Oral English Classes of Vocational and Technical CollegeInvestigation on teacher talk starts from 1970s, focuses mainly on elementary schools and junior and senior middle schools. With the development of the society, importance of teacher talk has been paid more attention to. Therefore, field of investigation broadens to teacher talk of university teachers, but less attention has been paid to studies on teacher talk of vocational and technical colleges. The first paper regard to teacher talk of vocational and technical colleges at home is published in 2006. Soon afterwards, study concerning this aspect of teacher talk published one after another on domestic periodicals, but less importance has been attached to either quantitative or qualitative study.Austin and Searle's Speech Act Theory was set as the rationale of this study. The theory was put forward in 1955 by John Austin in a series of lectures published as How To Do Things With Words at Harvard University. Austin segmented each speech act into three parts:locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act and they supplement each other. Former researchers also concentrated their study on this aspect of it. Searle, who is one of Austin's students, developed the Speech Act Theory and he broke down illocutionary act into five sub-categories: representatives/assertives, which commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition,such as asserting, concluding, etc; directives, which are attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something, like requesting, questioning; commissives, which commit the speaker to some future course of action, for instance promising, threatening, offering; expressives, which express a psychological state, for example thanking, apologizing, welcoming, congratulating; declarations, which effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra-linguistic institutions, such as excommunicating, declaring war, christening, firing from employment. This study is conducted by using Searle's division of five illocutionary acts of the Speech Act Theory to analyze teacher questions and feedbacks of vocational and technical college English teachers. This study is designed to answer the following three questions:What is the present situation of TT in vocational and technical colleges in these aspects:amount of TT, ways of asking questions and giving feedbacks and the use of Chinese? What are the characteristics of teacher's questions and feedbacks in vocational and technical colleges? How can the analysis of TT by using the Speech Act Theory benefits English teaching in vocational and technical colleges?Methods for analyzing the data----naturalistic inquiry and conversation analysis methodology were adopted in this study. Natualistic inquiry is a methodology that the researcher observe and study the phenomenon happening in real and natural situations without any disturbance from the outside. The methods commonly used are tape-recording, classroom observation, case study, teacher-interviews and questionnaire. The aim of naturalistic inquiry is to describe and have some knowledge about the real teaching procedure. The researcher choose five English teachers of Jilin Vocational and Technical College in Transportation as the studying target, who teach students entered college in 2009. Teaching class of the five teachers were video-taped first, then were transcribed into writing material and at last were analyzed by using SPSS. A questionnaire was designed by the author to ensure the validity of the recording data. They were distributed to 145 students of the five selected classes. The other method----Conversation Analysis Methodology is conducted by analyzing the conversations happened between teachers and students in classroom to make the data speak themselves. The object of this study is teacher talk, especially teachers'questions and feedbacks. The researcher extract valuable questions and feedbacks to analyze mainly by using Searle's illocutionary act theory.One of the two cores of this study is teachers'questions, because it plays an very important role in classroom teaching. Teachers'questions provided students opportunities to participate in classroom interaction and to express their opinions by using a certain language. Teachers' questions could bring about continuous interaction between students and teachers in classroom. Teachers' questions can help teachers to check whether the students undertand the teaching contents well or not. Teachers' questions can stimulate students to think independently. Teachers' questions are divided into two categories:display questions and referential questions. Study show that teachers ask more display questions than referential questions in class. Referential questions are suggested to use more because they can stimulate students to think and speak in the target language. Searle's illocutionary act theory was used to analyze teachers' questions. The research found that the transformation of the five sub-categories of illocutionary act could change the corresponding perlocutionary act, for instance, an assertive can be turned into a commissive, a directive into an expressive.The other core of this study is the study on teachers' feedbacks, because it is also crucial in classroom teaching. Feedbacks to students' answers directly show whether the purpose of the questions are achieved or not, whether the teaching tasks finished or not and whether the question-answering activity needs to continue or not. In this study, feedbacks are classified into four types:general praise, repetition+praise/praise+repetition, indicate adjustment/renew the answer and correct the mistake directly. Results show that general feedback is used most, which occupies 58% of the total feedbacks. While the lest type used by teachers is indicate adjustment/renew the answer, which occupies only 7% of the total feedbacks. What teachers need to do is not only give simple feedbacks to students' answers but also to offer evaluation by telling students their merits and demerits of their answers. Systematic analysis of teacher feedbacks shows that swift of the five illocutionary acts could also change the perlocutionary acts of utterances, for instance:a directive and a commissive to an expressive.Analysis from both qualitative and quantitative point of view, the researcher concluded that, for display questions, general feedback or general feedback with some short comments are proper for the reason that this kind of questions are more simple as long as students are care about what they learned. But for referential questions, repetition+praise/praise+repetition ways are more serviceable, because the answers of this kind of questions are more flexible for students to have their own opinions. Teachers' repetition on the one hand could make other students clearing about what the question-anwering student's opinion is, and on the other, could deliver this kind of information that the teacher paid attention to the student's answer, therefore give the student confidence.At the end of this study, the researcher recommended several ways to improve English teaching:Firstly, the importance of teacher talk is suggested to pay more attention to, because English class is different from other classes in the aspect that teacher talk is not only the tool of teaching but also the input students are receiving. Teachers might set themselves as examples to their students by using standard, proper language. Secondly, classroom is a common stage for both teachers and students, so harmonious and smooth communication between them is the basis for mutual advancement. Students are still the passive side in classroom activities, so teachers are suggested to learn how to animate the atmosphere and how to communicate with students. Thirdly, in classrooms, especially in oral English classrooms, teachers are suggested to give more speaking opportunities to students. Teachers are suggested to speak less and students speak more because the purpose of oral English teaching is to improve students oral English ability. Fourthly, teachers are suggested to use more open questions that is referential questions to strengthen students thinking and expressive competence. Lastly, as for feedbacks, positive feedbacks are suggested to use more. Teachers should make "repeat student's answers" as a habit because this may let students think they are attached importance to and therefore increased their confidence in learning English.Every study has its own limitations, this study is no exception:Firstly, the corpus of this study is accumulated by the author herself from only one grade of one vocational and technical college, the result could only reflect the present overall situation in some perspectives, so it is relatively unilateral. Secondly, the studying duration is limited. If more time is given for the study, the outcome might be more comprehensive and more persuasive. Thirdly, classroom teaching is not only conducted by teachers'language alone, teachers'facial expressions and body language also play a part. This study focuses only on teachers' classroom language, so it sees only one side of the coin. Finally, from the theoritical basis point of view, Searle's distinction of the types of illocutionary acts are not clear cut, which can also affect the validity of the study. There is few former researcher who studied exactly from this perspective of the Speech Act Theory, so the author developed many her own opinions, which might be partial to some extent.Teacher questions and feedbacks are crucial activities in the classroom, so the fruit of this study might be used for reference by both new teachers and old teachers. Some of the fruit might be used to teaching classes directly. Later studies could also be conducted from this aspect to further this study and testify the result of this study, and could also proceed from other perspectives of the Speech Act Theory to serve English teaching. Systematic, penetrating and convincing studies are those based on sufficient research, time and corpus. All in all, there is still a long way for studies of teacher talk to go.