The Analysis Of Attitude Resources In The Teacher Talk Of College English

There is a close relationship between the teacher talk and the teaching result. If the teacher can make proper use of the classroom language to give the good influence on the students, a good teaching result can be achieved. At present, there are lots of studies about the teacher talk including not only pronunciation, tone, speed, pause but also the teacher's questioning, feedback, correction as well as the comparison between the teacher talk and natural language, the quantity of teacher talk and students' talk etc. Generally speaking, these researches only focus on the analysis and description about the real teacher talk in the classroom without concerning about the emotional influence of teacher talk on the development of the whole class as well as the relationship between teachers and students.This thesis tries to apply a new theory framework----Appraisal theory to the analysis of teacher talk. The author collected the teacher talk in one English class and analyzed the Appraisal resources to study the influence of the Appraisal resources in teacher talk on the development of class and to find how the teacher made use of the Appraisal resources to promote the whole class, attract the students' learning interests, and create the harmonious relationship between the teacher and the students to achieve the teaching objection.Appraisal theory was put forward by the functional linguistician (James.R.Martin) in the 20th century and it is the further development about the interpersonal meaning under the framework of functional linguistics. Appraisal theory consists of three aspects:Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. Attitude is mainly about those values by which speakers attach assessment to participants and processes by reference either to emotional responses or to systems of culturally-determined value systems (White,2000). Engagement refers to the linguistic resources which explicitly position a text's proposals and propositions inter-subjectively. Graduation is concerned with recourses by which the force or intensity of an utterance may be raised or lowered.The author analyzed the Attitude resources in the collected teacher talk and hopes that the analysis can make teachers pay more attention to the teacher talk. From the analysis, it is found that there are rich Attitude resources in the teacher's classroom language. The teacher makes use of the Appraisal resources to establish the interpersonal position. By this way, the teacher can establish a good relationship with the students and make the class go smoothly.The author adopts both qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques. At first, the whole discourse is carefully analyzed under the framework of Appraisal theory.Then the author compares the percentage of different Appraisal resources with the total number that appears in the discourse in order to show their frequencies in the discourse. Finally, the frequencies of various Appraisal resources are analyzed to find possible significant differences related to the teacher's communicative purposes.The study is only limited to the corpus collected in one class and the collection of corpus may be subjective and casual, which may make the experimental result less representative.