An Empirical Study Of Teacher Talk In College English Intensive Reading Course

The study of Teacher Talk, TT for short, has been given great attention since the1950s in the field of classroom teaching research. TT refers to the language which teachers use to organize and manage the foreign language classrooms and implement their teaching plans. It is one of the major ways through which teachers deliver information to learners and control their behaviors. Ellis (1994) holds that "teachers address classroom language learners differently from the way they address other kinds of classroom learners. They adjust their utterances in both language form and language function in order to facilitate classroom communication. These adjustments are regarded as TT. ".TT is very important for organizing classroom activities and for students' language acquisition. Many researchers and teachers have done a great number of studies in recent years. Different from early studies on teacher talk, which dealt with phonological and syntactic features of TT, SLA researchers have turned their attention to the relationship between TT and second language acquisition. They claimed that comprehensible input and teacher-student interaction play an important role in improving students'acquisition of the target language. Therefore, they advocated that teachers should simplify their linguistic forms to achieve comprehensible input and to ensure the success of teacher-student interaction.The thesis is supported by the following theories:language leaching theory and language teacher competence, Krashen's input hypothesis, Long's interaction hypothesis and Swain's output hypothesis. This thesis introduces the definition, characteristics and functions of TT and made the research on College English TT. The theory of "language teaching theory and language teacher competence" holds that as a foreign language teacher, it is equally important to know a language well and to teach the language well. Teaching is an art as well as a science. The teacher needs to make the students understand the language, including pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. Besides, teachers also need to help develop their communicative competence to enable them to use the language. So the teacher needs develop various teaching methods, so that he not only knows what to teach and how to do it, but also why he should do it. Krashen's Input Hypothesis argues that the most important way of language teaching is to make learners absorb enough'comprehensible input'. Long's Interaction Hypothesis focuses on the negotiation of meaning, which facilitates language understanding. Besides,'two-way communication'surpasses'one-way communication'in language learning. Swain's Output Hypothesis holds that in terms of speaking, learners can not achieve the level of a native speaker unless through practical use of the language with some particular meanings.Based on the theories above, with the definition, characteristics and functions presented, the author carried out a study on the amount of TT, teachers'questioning and teachers'feedback through classroom observation and interview. Six teachers from Yantai University were chosen and nearly 350 college students attending lectures offered by these six teachers were also involved in this study. They were asked to respond to the questionnaire on TT in their college English classroom. The questionnaire based on Zhou Xing and Zhou Yun (2002) was composed of thirteen items containing the above three aspects of TT.The findings are summarized as follows:1. TT accounts for the majority of the class hours, leaving the students with little amount of time to practice.2. Teachers adopt much more display questions than, referential questions.3. Teachers give positive feedback to students'performances in class, yet they are too general to have some positive effect on the students.Some suggestions are put forward.(1) Decrease TT and increase student talk; at the same time, teachers should pay more attention to the quality of TT and improve their proficiency of language.(2) Use more referential questions to guide and organize students to take part in interaction and make meaningful negotiation in order to improve language acquisition.(3) Pass some positive comments on students' performances to strengthen students'motivation and interests of language learning.There are also some problems in this study.(1) The data was not collected by video recording, but by MP3 recorder. As we all know, the non-verbal behavior is also an important factor for the classroom communication and interaction.(2) The conclusion of this finding is limited, because the subjects in this research are just from one university and the number of the subjects is quite limited.(3) The time of this research is not long enough. If the author expanded the research time, the findings would be more convincing and more significant.